Chesapeake Quotes

“A ship, like a human being, moves best when it is slightly athwart the wind, when it has to keep its sails tight and attend its course. Ships, like men, do poorly when the wind is directly behind, pushing them sloppily on their way so that no care is required in steering or in the management of sails; the wind seems favorable, for it blows in the direction one is heading, but actually it is destructive because it induces a relaxation in tension and skill. What is needed is a wind slightly opposed to the ship, for then tension can be maintained, and juices can flow and ideas can germinate, for ships, like men, respond to challenge.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called state of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in conformance with its national customs. The”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“A BASIC TENET OF QUAKERISM WAS THAT IF A MAN or woman tended the divine fire that burned within each human breast, one could establish direct relationship to God without the intercession of priest or rabbi. Songs and shouted prayers were not necessary to attract God’s attention, for He dwelt within and could be summoned by a whisper. Nevertheless”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“CATHOLIC: Let me understand what you’re saying, Mrs. Paxmore. You believe that on some day to come, the religious leaders of this world are going to convene and state that what the Bible has condoned since the days of Abraham, that what Jesus Himself approved of and against which He never spoke … You believe that our leaders are going to tell the world, “It is all wrong”? QUAKER: I expect to spend my life, Neighbor Steed, trying to convince my religion that slavery is wrong. CATHOLIC: Aha! Then even your religion doesn’t condemn it? QUAKER: Not now. CATHOLIC”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“Decision at the Chesapeake by Harold A. Larrabee, which”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“On this headland, speculating as to what prudent steps he must take next, Pentaquod spent some of the quietest weeks of his life. The loneliness of the first days of his flight had now vanished, and he was at ease with his decision to quit the Susquehannocks. The spaciousness of his surroundings infected him, and he began to think in slower, less frantic terms. The natural fear that he might be unable to survive in a strange world dissolved, and he discovered in himself a courage much more profound than that required to flee downriver past strange villages; this was a mature courage capable of sustaining him in a confrontation with an entire world. Sometimes he would sit beneath the oak tree under whose protection he had built his small wigwam and simply survey his universe: the fascinating arms of water to the north, the vast marshes to the south, the western shore of the bay where the warlike tribes paraded, and he would think: This is the favored land. This is the richness. p18.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“This is still the world’s most enchanting inland water.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“the coast, but still in sight of England, they were becalmed for six agonizing weeks. The wind would not rise and there was nothing the infuriated captains could do; ominously, the leaders of the expedition watched the would-be settlers consume much of the food intended to see them through the first months of the experiment. It was not until May 14 that the ships unloaded at a swampy island in the James River,”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“Then a look of compassion filled her eyes; to be ignorant of the oyster was amusing, but to be unacquainted with the crab was pathetic.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“the burden of the thinking man is to calculate the probable good against the possible bad and to decide whether the change will be worth the risk.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“crested waves leaping and tossing white spume into the air.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“Navitan”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“werowance.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“roanoke”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“furbelows”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“demesnes,”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“comprehend”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“subvert”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“tussock,”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“avuncular”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“athwart”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“meretricious”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“There is no reason why any sane person should read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. It is one of the worst books ever written by an American, shoddy, meretricious and without any redeeming social value.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“subvention”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“In 1959 the Steed family was still divided into two branches: the Devon Steeds, who lived on what was left of the island; and the Refuge Steeds, who occupied a much more congenial series of estates on the mainland. The original strain had grown quite thin; after Judge Hathaway and Congressman Jefferson the Devon connection was quite barren, and after Lyman Steed the Refuge line was almost as bad. The family as a unit still owned the stores; their land was leaping ahead in value; and if the tomato canneries had proved a dead loss, the cornfields were replacing them.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“bull-necked”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“boob”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“The war had passed without invasion of the Choptank, and things were back in their somnolent grooves when the Maryland legislature, composed principally of men from the western shore, passed a bill authorizing the construction of a mighty bridge right across Chesapeake Bay.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake