Quotes from James A. Michener

About this time the custom arose of referring to the Eastern Shore with capital letters, as if it were a special place; this tribute was never paid the western shore.

The worst thing a nation can do to itself is to cultivate and maintain a supply of cheap labor. When salaries are kept down, money stops circulating, taxes bring in diminished funds, and everybody loses. The white man thinks he's hurting us when he keeps our wages low. Actually, he's hurting himself.

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.

this world contains an irreducible minority of sick sons of bitches, and sooner or later one of them is going to impinge on your life, and mine.

You can't have a much better omen than an albatross

CATHOLIC: No, but as I said before, all places in this world are ordained. Some are kings and they rule. Some are slaves and they serve. Some are women and they enjoy their special role, an honored one which does not include speaking in church. QUAKER

While the islands were taking their final form, Jesus spoke in Jerusalem and Muhammad came from the blazing deserts with a new vision of heaven, but no men knew the heaven that awaited them on these islands.

Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord

Books which we still read today were written before these islands were known to anyone except the birds of passage. Songs which we still sing were composed and recorded while these islands remained vacant. The Bible had been compiled, and the Koran.

he could look at the evidence planted in the universe and from it derive a new concept, and a greater thing than this no mind can accomplish

but she possessed what was better than beauty: an absolutely realistic evaluation of life.

From that moment on I have never handled a gun. I have found even the shooting of a rattlesnake abhorrent, and I recommend to all my descendants that they keep away from firearms, for I have found that they do far more damage to good men than to evil.

to well up in his eyes as he listened to their farewells;

But you're right that all of us, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, have got to work out some sensible pattern of life for the world, or new alignments will occur so radical that no one here can visualize

The real poet has the last line in mind when he writes his first.

In this prudent way every portion of the Castle Gorka hogs was utilized: the good cuts for the banquet, the tougher ones in Pani Danusia's pierogi, the haslet in Anulka's kielbasa. This good husbandry was symbolic of the rational way in which Poland had organized itself in the year 1646, when magnates, gentry and peasants were about as happy as they had ever been.

The earth is something you protect every day of the year. A river is something you defend every inch of its course.

When Wiktor asked how Miss Trilling had acquired so much knowledge of music, she resumed an earlier explanation which had been interrupted: "I attended a distinguished college in America, Oberlin, where music was important.

In Malaya, in China, over Europe or in the jungle airports of the Amazon this word betokens final catastrophe: "Mayday, Mayday.

How a work of art ends is just as important as how it begins. A good opening entices us, but a strong finish nails down the experience.

but on this night he proved that he could do something that none of his companions could: he could look at the evidence planted in the universe and from it derive a new concept, and a greater thing than this no mind can accomplish.

The waste, the waste is so deplorable. Year by year the Caribbean is robbed of its best, and how in hell can a region survive if it allows that?

In depicting the Indian background, do not commit these traditional errors: Do not show them on war parties in full regalia. I judge from what I have read that Indians in their everyday occupations looked pretty much like students at the Boulder campus of Colorado University today, except that the Indians may have been somewhat cleaner.

When you seek, you find things you did not anticipate.