“The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation’s unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There’s no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased—much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“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 her, but she knew that there could be no viable alternative. She dashed inside the orphanage and grabbed the few things that belonged to her.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.
Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“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.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“It was rather that he discovered for himself the inherent undesirability of becoming a leader; it was an act of pomp engaged in by lesser men who enjoyed bedecking themselves in feathers. He would let others use office to proclaim their feats. He would concentrate on the feat itself, doing what had to be done … in silence.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“It really set my nerves jangling,” Jenny Larsen confessed. “Wasn’t it strange, the way it kept up, day after day?” Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
James A. Michener
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date February 3, 1907
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“Didn’t you find it all … rather unsatisfying?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.”
A slight smile. “The result was I went nowhere.”
― Pat Barker, quote from Regeneration
“And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill, full of night-blooming flowers. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music, There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king, embracing a changeling like a bother, and, with a human boy at his side, names a girl his champion.”
― Holly Black, quote from The Darkest Part of the Forest
“One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one's limitations.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, quote from The Unconsoled
“Sometimes things that seem like good ideas in theory, in practice turn out to be the worst kinds of boneheaded blunders.”
― Jean Ferris, quote from Once Upon a Marigold
“The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
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