I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
We are never prepared for what we expect.
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.
The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
Writers turn dreams into print.
A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.
For this is the journey that men make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find.
Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man.
A soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.
We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.
This is not a promise, this is not threat, it's just the way it's gonna be!!!
The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.
To have courage. To have honor. Is very beautiful.
Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.
Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.
It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.
I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.
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(I)f you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living?
Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.
A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I've known were the laziest. Never work because it's expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don't do any more.
It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.
At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.
This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it … in an evil way.
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![I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/james-a-michener-24128.jpg)
I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]
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.
With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.
How small he was and how wormy in manner,
I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before.
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.
Wherever a human being goes, there is a challenge. Be the best man you can, and your gods will look with favor upon you.
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 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.
