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"They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold."
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"People are going to break promises, and they will have every right to till the point you realize that you don't change plans based on someone else's words."
"All that is great cannot be possessed - and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing."
"The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians."
"Just because you have a past with someone, doesn't mean you should have a future with them."
"If they weren't good for you in 2015, they won't be great for you in 2016. Let them go."
"Having less worries is what allows me to talk to beggars in the street or tell jokes at waitresses and try to make them smile. I couldn't do that before, when I had a job and was always worried about money."
"It must be frustrating to survive the gauntlet that is our western medical schooling system only to one day come to the realization that you have been taught only to manage illness and disease instead of curing it."
"Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth."
"Sometimes the best solution is to stop trying to change people."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck
"The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had."
"I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land."
"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."
"At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head."
"There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning."
"Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping."
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