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"Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I want to hold on to. That's not true of course - just a feeling like the quick one of hexing your trip so you couldn't go. The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar."
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"It's ridiculous to repeat costly mistakes because you believe there is always a next chance. Mistakes may flow, but you have all it takes to close the canals they used!"
"The Holy Bible is the greatest book."
"When you live by understanding, you will escape destructions."
"It doesn't work, she continues, unclasping her hands, smoothing her skirt. "What you're feeling right now doesn't work. You can't wander around and think the wandering will call them back. Believe me. I know you don't want to hear the long view, but let me tell you. You are so young. I know it's none of my business. But still."
"When you abbreviate your learning, you abbreviate your growth. Expand your knowledge and you keep growing taller and fatter than your limitations."
"Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive."
"Knowledge is the path, understanding is the way, wisdom is the highway, and enlightenment is the destination."
"We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom."
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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