James A. Michener Quotes

I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

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."

People and places know greatness for a while, then decline.

He found that love is never to be defined, that it grows and changes with every year of life, that each person knows it as a different miracle... Nothing can shame it. Nothing can make it more splendid than it already is. Shared, wantoned or hidden forever, it can fill a life. There is no understanding love, and there is no defeat so precious as trying. No aspect of life is more complex, and none so simple. A look, a word, and the heart is torn forever; a touch, and it is mended. Love is brave and cowardly. In the same person it is secret and garrulous. But above all, love establishes its own rules and no man can know its complete manifestation in the heart of another.

"In later years, it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, "They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well." Others made jest of the missionary slogan, "They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light," by pointing out: "Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn't nailed down.

The Boer nation had become a theocracy, and would so remain.

The constable said, “Just time enough for the scars to heal, so that I can whip them open again.” He thought of this statement a long time and wondered why people so attached to God should take such positive delight in crucifying a man who had precisely the same love for God, but with a different manner of expressing it. He even understood the punishment, for he had observed that all people allied to a church seek to protect it, but he would never understand the pleasure the Puritans took in the infliction of punishment.

When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man.

The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.

Because a boy who could read would sooner or later come upon some book that would give him an idea, and a boy with an idea could accomplish almost anything.

From the time that money began to be regarded with honor, the real value of things was forgotten.

We already know which genes in one chromosome are responsible for Tay-Sachs disease, which afflicts Jews with a fatal disorder. That already permits us to do genetic counseling of young couples with the gene who may want to marry: ‘Since you both carry a defective chromosome, better not have children.

If you try it,” Whip said, “you’ll be thrown out on your inalienable ass.

the fundamental fact that law directs the ongoing of society. It is rooted in the past, determines the present, and protects the future.