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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They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.
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For some time now they had been suspicious of him.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.
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Youth is truth.
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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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Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
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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.