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"You see, I have been at revaluing myself in the last few days. I may have some value to historians because I have destroyed a few things. The builder of your Cathedral is forgotten even now, but I, who burned it, may be remembered for a hundred years or so. And that may mean something or other about mankind."
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"To reproduce your life is to convert it into tangible products for the benefit of humanity."

"Every artist takes their final work to the grave."

"The minimum you should do with your life is to at least reproduce it."

"Invest your evaporating life and reap greatness. Invest your evaporating time and leave a legacy behind for future generations. Take this short time that you have on earth and convert it into greatness."

"The effectiveness of your life is not determined by the duration of your life."

"Lessons are learned through making mistakes, falling and rising."
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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