Quotes from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

I am afraid much of my existence is going to be more or less alone, and I might as well go into training for it.

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At times I feel that I am playing around the edges of things, getting nowhere.

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It is very tiresome and tiring to walk and have the ground give way under you at every step.

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In a rougher age I would have been eliminated I guess. A saber tooth would have grabbed me while I looked stupidly at pond lilies.

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My garden is so lovely that I shall hate ever to leave it.

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It is a gray day with little dusty spurts of rain. A good day for inwardness.

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There—it’s raining again. Our garden is most charming in the rain.

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One piece of advice I can offer, and that is that you should never let any one suggest anything about your story to you.

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I grow less complicated all the time and that is a joy to me. The forces that used to tug in various directions have all started to pull in one. I have a book to write. I think about it for a while and then I write it. There is nothing more.

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Ideologies change to fit a situation.

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The rain is pounding on the roof. Very pleasant. bye.

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In a sense, everything one does is practice for something else.

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There is so much confusion now—emotional hysteria which passes for thought and blind faith which passes for analysis.

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Living is people, not places.

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There are moments of panic but those are natural I suppose.

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I do get the horrors every now and then. Comes on like a cold wind. There it is, just a matter of weathering it. Alcohol doesn’t help that a bit. I usually go into the garden and work hard.

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I believe that everyone needs something outside himself to cling to.

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The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it to or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one.

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There is no protection. The best protection is to be wide open to everything. It is the protected who get the worst hurt.

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Always I feel that I am living in a dream and that I will awaken to something quite different. It’s very unreal but then everything always has been to me. Maybe I never saw anything real.

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A house is very dead without a dog.

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The democracy of art does not require universal acclaim. In fact instant acceptance is often a diagnostic of inferiority.

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I have a workroom with a window looking out over a garden. Couldn’t want better.

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It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

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I get up, shake down the coal in the stove, make coffee and for an hour look out at the meadows and the trees. I hear and smell and see and feel the earth and I think—nothing. This is the most wonderful time.

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Criticise nothing, evaluate nothing. Just let the Thing come thundering in—accept and enjoy. It will be chaos for a while but gradually order will appear and an order you did not know.

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You should resist letting self-analysis become self-abuse.

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I think the best gift I could give my son is that fierce sense of independence.

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I’m going to do what people call rest for a while. I don’t quite know what that means—probably reorganize.

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I don’t know that my way is right but only that it is my way. And if I have had the slightest impact in the world, it has been through my way.

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I know now there’s going to be no respite in my life for this longing to be one place or another.

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When one is ashamed, he builds a wall of defenses and justifications.

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I regret my stupidities but only as I might regret my big ears and shapeless nose. They are all a part of me and I could no more cut off my stupidities than my nose to spite my face.

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Well, the fact of the matter with you as well as with me is that there wasn’t really any choice. You did and will do what you are. If you had forced yourself to make the opposite choice you would have been in violation of yourself, and I truly believe you would have been much more miserable than you are.

 

Quotes from "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories" by Ken Liu.

We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.

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Boys were simple, and fists could do the talking for them. The magic of words between girls was much more complicated.

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When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years.

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People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

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Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love.

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Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It’s complicated.

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A lot of people were angry at my parents, saying they were reckless and irresponsible to endanger a child like that. But I’m forever grateful to them. They gave me the greatest gift parents could give to a child: fearlessness.

 

 

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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

-James Baldwin