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James A. Michener Quotes
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Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
James A. Michener
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If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
James A. Michener
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Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
James A. Michener
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I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
James A. Michener
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I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener
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The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
James A. Michener
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Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history.
James A. Michener
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The Luna broke away to start its descent to what Tucker Thompson had told his readers was "the dark and dangerous chasm in which unknown forces threaten the life of any trespasser." Dr. Mott, reading the report in Folks, growled, "The basic forces are identical with those which govern Brooklyn. Only the landscape is different."
James A. Michener
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I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.
James A. Michener
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When men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.
James A. Michener
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Never forget, son, when you represent Texas, always go first class.
James A. Michener
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At NACA [fictional space agency] we solve everything eventually. That's our job, and now it's yours.... At NACA... there are no insoluble problems. Only timeconsuming ones.
James A. Michener
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I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
James A. Michener
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No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.
James A. Michener
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... organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.
James A. Michener
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I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town.
James A. Michener
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I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
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... the crucial Battle of Zamość, which is not stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won.
James A. Michener
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[The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.
James A. Michener
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Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.
James A. Michener
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He had obtained a clearer view of his homeland by leaving it and seeing it through the eyes of others.
James A. Michener
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I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
James A. Michener
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The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.
James A. Michener
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On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.
James A. Michener
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I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.
James A. Michener
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Quote of the day
Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
James A. Michener
Creative Commons
Born:
February 3, 1907
Died:
October 16, 1997
(aged 90)
Bio:
James Albert Michener was an American author of more than 40 books, the majority of which were fictional, lengthy family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating solid history.
Known for:
Centennial (1974)
Chesapeake (1978)
Tales of the South Pacific (1947)
The Novel (1991)
The Covenant (1980)
Most used words:
people
man
islands
poland
brezhnev
years
writers
life
battle
time
love
job
left
food
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