James A. Michener - Man Quotes

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I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.

James A. Michener
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure. But having failed in one location and having been ejected, it is possible that in the next he will be a little wiser.

James A. Michener
I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss.

James A. Michener
A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild.

James A. Michener
In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled."

James A. Michener
I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

James A. Michener
... 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
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find: Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE. But if a man happens to find himself... then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

James A. Michener