A Quote by James A. Michener
I don’t know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss...
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I could play a cop, I could play a crook, I could play a lawyer, I could play a dentist, I could play an art critic-I could play the guy next door. I am the guy next door. I could play Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. As a matter of fact, when I did The Odd Couple, I would do it a different way each night. On Monday I'd be Jewish, Tuesday Italian, Wednesday Irish-German-and I would mix them up. I did that to amuse myself, and it always worked.
The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
And the rules were so clear, you could not deviate from that all. And I think it especially damaged my sisters because there was nothing they could do to get my father's attention, to win his approval. They could not play sports. They could not do these other things. They could not be tough. They could not be macho. And so I think they suffered just from sheer neglect if nothing else.
How could it be that I had a legal obligation to kill people I did not know, and who did certainly not consent to it, while my father's doctor could not help my father to die when my farther asked for it? My consternation brought me to moral philosophy and a life-long search for an answer to the question when and why we should, and when we shouldn't, kill.
You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.
It was only my second night in Africa, yet something had begun to grow inside me which I could not stop, as if my childhood dreams had finally found the place where they could materialize. I had arrived where I was always meant to be. I did not know how it could be practically achieved, but I was certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was here that I wanted to live.
I grew up in a family in which no male upstream from me had ever finished high school, much less gone to college. But I was taught that even though there was nothing I could do about what was behind me, I could change everything about what was in front of me. My working poor parents told me that I could do better.
'Perfection' to me is, I walk away from a situation and say, 'I did everything I could do right there. There was nothing more that I could do.' I was a hundred percent, like the meter was at the top. There was nothing else I could have done. You know? Like, I worked as hard as I possibly could have. That's perfection.
Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.
I always think about the role models I had when I was a little girl. They really made me feel how big I could dream, they made me feel I could do things that I did not think I could do before. And because of them, I went and did what I did and I am where I am now.
I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.
I mean, people don't know what race I am. They never know if I'm Hawaiian or Italian or Mexican or Spanish or white. I could play Jewish, I could play anything.
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
I remember calling and asking, because I had a few lines that were like, "How could the character have done this?" and I hadn't read the part of the script that said what she [ Cate Blanchett] did, so they put me on the phone with Woody... Allen. I don't know if I could really say "Woody."
If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.
Did you know that Nuremberg courtroom was designed so that the Allies could project movies during the trial? And, also so that they could film the trial? The first movies that were shown were prepared by John Ford - a compilation of material from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. But here comes an interesting part. Did you know they lit (using fluorescent tubes) the defendants so they could be filmed watching the films that were shown during the trial?
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