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Jack London

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Famous Jack London Quotes

“From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.”

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Author:Jack London
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“Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He would stand up, with open eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of making words obedient servitors, and making combinations of words mean more than the sum of their separate meanings. He was stirred profoundly by the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids - until it came to him taht it was very quiet, and he saw Ruth regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in her eyes.”

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Book:Martin Eden
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“Editörlerin yüzde doksan dokuzunun başta gelen özelliği, başarısızlıkları. Yazar olmayı başaramamışlar. Sakın masabaşı işinin sıkıcılığını, satışların ve işletme müdürünün kölesi olmayı yazarlıktan daha çok istediklerini zannetme. Yazmaya çalışmış ve becerememişler. İşte lanetli paradoks da tam burada. Edebiyatta başarıya açılan her kapının önünde bekçi köpeği olarak onlar, yani edebiyatta başarıya ulaşamamışlar durur. Editörlerin, editör yardımcılarının ve dergilere, yayınevlerine dosya değerlendirmesi yapan danışmanların hepsi, yazar olmaya çalışmış ama bunu başaramamış kişilerden oluşuyor. Özgünlük ve deha konusunda yargı makamında oturup, matbaaya neyin gidip neyi gitmeyeceğine karar verenler, şu dünyada bu işi yapması gereken son kişiler, yani özgün bir yanlarının olmadığı kanıtlanmış, ilahi kıvılcımın yanlarına bile uğramadığı belli olmuş adamlar.”

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Book:Martin Eden
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“The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction and generously rewarded, will toil the artists. The result will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time. And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship beauty”

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Author:Jack London
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“Нельзя сказать, что отец — плохой человек: он славный и добрый, но решительно неспособен понять его, Джо, и вообще душу мальчика. Вот в чем беда. Еще сегодня утром он говорил, что мир — это не площадка для тенниса и что мальчики, которые смотрят на жизнь легкомысленно, часто попадают впросак и рады бывают поскорее вернуться домой.”

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Book:Путешествие на "Ослепительном"
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“Ни за какие деньги в мире нельзя купить жизни человеческой, и никакими деньгами нельзя искупить дурно проведенной жизни: деньги не способны украсить, наполнить и выпрямить жизнь того, кто себя искалечил, кто испортил свою жизнь.”

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Book:Путешествие на "Ослепительном"
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“I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.”

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Book:Jack London Six Pack
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“Strength is an empty shell.”

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Book:JACK LONDON Ultimate Collection: 250+ Works in One Volume: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs, Essays & Articles (Illustrated): The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague, A Son of the Sun, Son of the Wolf, South Sea Tales, Children of the Frost, John Barleycorn, The War of the Classes…
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“A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth beneath which we cannot go.”

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Author:Jack London
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“As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very primitive. How many thousands of years of culture, think you, have rubbed and polished at our raw edges? One probably; at the best, no more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla.”

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Author:Jack London
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“Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.”

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Book:JACK LONDON Ultimate Collection: 250+ Works in One Volume: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs, Essays & Articles (Illustrated): The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague, A Son of the Sun, Son of the Wolf, South Sea Tales, Children of the Frost, John Barleycorn, The War of the Classes…
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“All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming--ay, of forming and forgetting.”

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Book:Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer
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“I early learned that there were two natures in me. This caused me a great deal of trouble, till I worked out a philosophy of life and struck a compromise between the flesh and the spirit. Too great an ascendancy of either was to be abnormal, and since normality is almost a fetish of mine, I finally succeeded in balancing both natures. Ordinarily they are at equilibrium; yet as frequently as one is permitted to run rampant, so is the other. I have small regard for an utter brute or for an utter saint.”

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Author:Jack London
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“And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.”

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Book:Call of The Wild, White Fang
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“When, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.”

LongStillsNightLiteratureStarsDarkCenturyColdDustNosesStillnessAncestorWoePointingCadenceCold Night
Book:The Call of the Wild and White Fang
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“Mercedes nursed a special grievance - the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex pregorative, she made their lives unendurable.”

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Book:Jack London for Kids – Breathtaking Adventure Tales & Animal Stories (Illustrated Edition): Children’s Book Classics, Including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Jerry of the Islands, The Cruise of the Dazzler, Michael Brother of Jerry & Before Adam
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