James A. Michener Quotes

Rabbi Akiba said: Israel must not be like the pagans, thanking their wooden gods when good happens and cursing them when evil comes. When good comes, the Jews thank God, and when evil comes, they thank Him too.

Alaska did not produce supermen, but in its formative periods it was served by men of character and determination, and it is a fortunate land which knows such public servants.

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.

The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

Vaval’s collection of former slaves certainly would have been pushed back into the final closed valley had not an ally stormed into St.-Domingue to fight on his side. It was a remorseless antagonist, General Yellow Fever,

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.

Losing a battle is far less important than losing relative position in the hierarchy.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

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Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed.

If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you’re typing faster than your mind is working.

Why is it, Reverend Hale, that we must always laugh at our book, but always revere yours?

When the mind of man ceases to thrust outward, it begins to contract and wither.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

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.