James A. Michener Quotes

The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific

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.

Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly.

This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it … in an evil way.

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.

The mystic perceives with his heart what the mind knows to be true... but cannot prove

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries

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

Where is Winesooth?” she had asked Wiktor, and he had said rather sharply: “On the map, where else?” “But where on the map? Clearly, it’s not on mine.” “It’s got to be,” he snapped, grabbing the map from her, then jabbing at it with his finger. “Right there, where it should be.” “But that says Lancut,” she protested, and when Wiktor looked again at the map he repeated: “It’s right here, where I said.

The chance emergence of the was nothing. Remember this. But its persistence and patient accumulation of stature were everything. Only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist.

brief time we’re allotted. I would be most pleased if you would report to my class in

While César Vaval’s parents were still alive they spent much effort in teaching him the things they believed he ought to know: “No slavery is any good. Danish is worst by far. French is best, maybe. But you live for one thing only, to be free.” His parents had died at about the same time, worked to death by the owner of their plantation, but before they died they told their son: “Study everything the white man does. Where does he get his power? Where does he hide his guns? How does he sell the sugar we make? And no matter how you do it, learn to read his books. There’s where he keeps his secrets, and unless you master them, you’ll always be a slave.

I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.

Timelessly, relentlessly, in storm and hunger and hurricane the island was given life, and this life was sustained only by constant new volcanic eruptions that spewed forth new lava that could be broken down into life-sustaining soil. In violence the island lived, and in violence a great beauty was born.

I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.