Quotes from James A. Michener

If you try it," Whip said, "you'll be thrown out on your inalienable ass.

That's the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.

A novel…is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience… You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there's nothing you can't do, if you do it with passion.

seem to understand. With three walled

Undisciplined, determined to be free.

a word once written will often accidentally find a life that no one anticipates; it lies

And here Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â Now the orange became Tejas: "In the middle of this mess, Tejas, Spanish to the core, God's bastion, just as in Europe." He patted the orange, reveling in its security, and said: "God arranges these things according to His grand design. Believe me, Trinidad, Tejas is not where it is by accident. And you're not in Tejas by accident. Your destiny is to rear Spanish sons who will build there cities much finer than New Orleans.

Sometimes when the Japanese maids, in crisp white uniforms, had withdrawn, a Roosevelt appointee would ask timorously, "These Japanese, can they be trusted?" And The Fort invariably replied, "We've had Sumiko for eighteen years, and we've never known a better or more loyal maid.

voluntary part of their

Love is the self-revelation of two souls. Sometimes it comes in a blinding moment in only one day, sometimes after a slow awakening of eleven years. God takes no cognizance of the timetable.

in 1954 it looked as if a deep schism had been driven down the middle of our community, pitting Japanese against haole, but the Sakagawa boys had the courage to back away from that tempting, perilous course. They reconciled haole and Japanese, and it is to their credit that they did so.

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.

What did the hat say to the hatrack? You stay here and I'll go on a head.

A man charged with a crime has a right to a lawyer, and when the community is most strongly against him, his right is morally greatest.

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

But if I turn my back on a supposed communist, how do I know that I am not turning my back on the very concept of liberty that I am seeking to protect? Honest men can always get someone to defend them. But what does justice mean if apparently dishonest men can find no one?

John Whipple did not allow his anger at such treatment to obscure his judgment. In years of trading around the Pacific he had often met obstinate men and the cruel situations which they produce, and he had learned that in such confrontations his only chance of winning lay in doing exactly what in conscience ought to be done. It was by reliance upon this conviction that he had quietly made his way in such disparate jungles as Valparaiso, Batavia, Singapore and Honolulu.

When you are a citizen, the earth feels different.

I doubt, dearest child, that you could ever marry a Frenchman. They're not dependable. I've never believed that they're serious Catholics." He

It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell.

The mariachis grinned and the leader apologized: "We thought you were only a norteamericano." I winced at this pejorative term but said nothing, because I knew that proud Mexicans liked to remind visitors from the north, "Everyone on this continent is an americano, you're a norteamericano. Don't rob us of our name by stealing it for yourselves.

As an engineer he favored blunt speech

The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it was the longed-for escape from the canyons of New York. Then the unwilling theatre for an American military triumph. But now it has become the meeting ground for Asia and America.

There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway.