Quotes by James A. Michener

“Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with nature. To be wholly alive a man must know storms, he must feel the ocean as his home or the air as hi...”

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

“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)]”

“Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.”

“Because I am for them, Commander, because their ancestors stood up to that Nazi, Bligh, just like I would be for one little Jew, terrified and hungry, crossing the Pyrenees to get away to freedom f...”

“Very early on in life, I decided the hell with it: material things weren't for me. Christmas would come, and other kids would have all these presents, and it wouldn't bother me a bit.”

“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

“It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.”

“Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”

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

“I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of...”

“You have to be eligible for luck to strike and I think that's a matter of education and preparation and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.”

“All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.”

“The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.”

“We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.”

“Over a hundred German scientists arrived here [Huntsville] at eleven o’clock on an April morning and by nightfall more than sixty had applied for cards at the free library.”

“It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, and his gun and his wagon, and his waiting horses. She had no conception of what was being asked of...”

“For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do.”

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

“No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”