James A. Michener Quotes
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Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly.
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On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, 'If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn.'
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For some time now they had been suspicious of him.
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...the crucial Battle of Zamość, which is not stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won.
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I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.
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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.
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No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
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I missed a whole cycle of childhood, but I've never used it as a device for self-pity.
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The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
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Look, son, if you calculate on getting me drunk and outsmarting me, quit now, because you simply can't do it.
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Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.
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On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.
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I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town.
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Youth is truth.
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Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
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I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.
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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.
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...organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.