"Saints can spring from any soil."
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John Steinbeck quotes (page 30 of 35)
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years."
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"For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word."
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"I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out."
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"It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate."
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"Dear Lord,' he said. 'let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely. For Jesus’ sake, Amen."
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"He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row"
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"The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever."
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"Guys like us got nothing to look ahead to"
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"All we got is the family unbroke."
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"You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow."
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"...no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love."
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"Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten."
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"Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork."
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"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another."
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"Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil."
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"Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages."
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"I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir--but I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brave man will have made them a little braver."
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"A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there."
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"We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way."
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