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"I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of the truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agonyof a lie is neverlost. That's a running sore."
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"Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk."
"Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse."
"I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal."
"Prostitution' is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from."
"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."
"There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death."
"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."
"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him."
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."
"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."
"I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains."
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