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"He's got a can up there,' Richard said."
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Exlpore more Absurdity quotes

"This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values...."

"What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?"

"Dangerous as a lightning strike, as lethal as a pair of crisscrossing short swords, William whispered, "You're about to find out how your liver tastes, my friend."I have tasted it already, Zacharel said, his voice its usual monotone. The snowflakes began to fall in earnest, tiny at first, but growing in diameter. An arctic wind blustered around him. "It was a bit salty.How the hell was a guy supposed to respond to that?Apparently William didn't know, either, because he gaped at the angel. Then, "Maybe if you added a little pepper?O-kay. It was official. William had an answer for everything."

"Flowers are evil, because they live just to die for the love of other people. You don't believe me? Try it for yourself and see if you'll be good afterwards. Undeath is a way of life, for some things. That doesn't make it good or anything. Especially anything. Nothing makes anything anything. Because nothing is a serious matter, and anything just is."

"To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way."

"I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it."

"He had a bleeding cut on his leg and he smelled like shit.Her nose wrinkled. "Step in something?" she asked innocently. mind was being hit by a cab, then landing on the lap of a naked man. With an erection, Anya. He had an erection."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."

"Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter..."

"But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there."

"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."

"We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way."

"Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew-that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
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