James A. Michener Quotes

It would never be known for certain who drafted the reply to the starving farmers, but since it was delivered to Jamaica as Victoria’s personal response to their pleas, it became known in history as The Queen’s Advice:

He was reminded that men may be angels, but they are animals, too. They are driven by uncontrollable forces and only the love of other people makes it possible for them to survive. Men are lonely and are stricken in the night. They lock their jaws against themselves. They scream like animals, and even though they ridicule love and the forces of destruction, they are themselves theatres for the operation of such forces.

Remember the story of what your god Yahweh said not far from here? ‘Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature. Yahweh seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but Yahweh looketh on the heart.

On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything — I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.” — Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 297

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.

university of rural Poland with its two colleges: the farm soil and the kitchen argument.

When Hiram Cater was seven years old his serious education began, not in spelling or arithmetic but in the brutal tactics of survival in a white world.

Very rich people — in all nations — can be divided into two categories; those with brains and those without. Those with brains make a great effort to hold on to every penny they have while preaching to the general population that freedom and dignity and patriotism are possible only under their protection; in this way they elicit the support of the very people they hold in subjection. The magnates of Poland used this tactic brilliantly, preaching loudly: “The most insignificant member of the gentry with one horse and sword is the equal of the most powerful magnate in his castle,” while at the same time depriving landless gentry of almost all rights and treating them with contempt.

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

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.

Shelomith’s hand falls from mine, and all I can think of is that somehow I must seek out the new king to see if he plans the building of new edifices. But Shelomith has dropped to her knees and I hear her praying, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not.

when the law of 1636 was passed, Barbados had few slaves and mostly white indentured workers in a total population of only six thousand. But by 1649, there were thirty thousand slaves on the island as against almost the same number of whites, so that the slaves judged they had a chance for victory.

they swore there at the edge of the forest overlooking a gully that stood between them and the French troops in Le Cap: “We will defy Napoleon to the death! We will never again be slaves!” And from that day on, General Vaval, fighting alone, became a military hurricane

One day it struck me with full force that a husband is worth having, and it was worth making every effort to win a good one. So when Laurence appeared I set out to win him with an abandon I never knew I had. You can do the same.