213 Quotes by James A. Michener

There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway.

The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.

Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.

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

I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.

The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

«Он самостоятельно дошел до понимания, что инстинктивная ненависть к евреям совершенно бессмысленна, а в поддержку рациональной неприязни нельзя привести никаких доказательств.»

The traveler wishing to observe Islamic Spain has his choice of two cities, Granada with its Alhambra or Córdoba with its Great Mosque (in Spanish Mezquita). Of the two former is be a considerable degree the more exciting and also the easier to absorb for its buildings, gardens and geographic settings are immediately recognizable as significant. It would take a dull man to miss the point of Granada, for its Alhambra is a museum of Islamic memories.

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.