James A. Michener II

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

Writers turn dreams into print.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

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 II

Derek Walcott

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

I read; I travel; I become

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

What are men? Children who doubt.

Love After Love
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Roman Payne

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.

I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.

Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.

Pascal Mercier

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.

Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.

In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?

Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else.

To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.

That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?

Roald Dahl II

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.

I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Colette II

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Hope costs nothing.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

When she raises her eyelids, it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

Augustine of Hippo

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.

Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.

Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.

And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.

The measure of love is to love without measure.

In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.

Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.

Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Dave Barry II

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.'

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy. 

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

Steven Pinker

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.

Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.