“The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“Don't put off what you can do today because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“They’ll hear about your husband’s fortune. The suitors will begin to gather, and I want you to promise me this. Whenever one of them proposes, as they will, Doris must say rapturously, ‘Oh, David! All my life I’ve wanted to live in Israel.’ When he hears that she intends to live there instead of bringing him to the United States, you’ll see his interest evaporate. I said evaporate. It vanishes.” He waved his hands violently back and forth across his face to indicate total abolishment.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“The Arabs can lose every war, if only they win the last one.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“The Arabs can lose every war, if only they win the last one. The Jews have gained nothing if they win all the wars but lose the last one.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“Negroes were drafted, white men weren’t; the poor were hauled off to war, the rich weren’t; the stupid were shot at, the bright boys weren’t.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“A sensible man never brags about two things. How lovable his first wife was and how good his last school was.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“She was always pleased when a young man said “I can’t” rather than “I won’t,” because the former indicated a moral conviction that could not be set aside, whereas the latter implied mere personal preference without a solid footing.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“It's the good minds that find difficulty in committing themselves”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“Tanks are nothing unless they’re kept moving. Because if you leave them static, a determined team can destroy them every time.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“In this country we get stuck with taxes, but in the old country we used to get stuck with bayonets.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
James A. Michener
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date February 3, 1907
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“I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.”
― Vanessa Veselka, quote from Zazen
“Hathin stared out across the water and deliberately let her eyes unfocus slightly. It did no good lodging your gaze on the waves as they slid and fractured. The trick was to see nothing and everything, until you started to notice any tear or break in the rhythms of the water.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from The Lost Conspiracy
“I glance in the mirror. Surprise,
surprise—I look finger-lickin’
delicious.”
― Victoria Scott, quote from The Collector
“I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I’d be missed. Killing myself was my job, my responsibility. (131)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
“and built a makeshift queen-size loft over the drum kit. It was as welcome an innovation as the flush toilet had been in eighteenth-century”
― Slash, quote from Slash
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The Postman Always R...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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