Centennial Quotes

“Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation’s unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There’s no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased—much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“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.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.

Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“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.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“In the late afternoon he was standing by a tent run by a trapper-merchant from Oregon, an Englishman named Haversham, the only man at the rendezvous in European dress, and Haversham asked, “Care for a cup of tea?” It had been a long time since McKeag had drunk tea and he said, “Don’t mind if I do.” The Englishman had two china cups and a small porcelain pot. Washing the cups with steaming water, he took down a square brown tin, opened the top carefully and placed a small portion of leaves in the pot. To McKeag they bore no visible difference from the tea leaves his mother had used, but when Haversham poured him a cup and he took his first sip, an aroma unlike any he had ever known greeted him. He sniffed it several times, then took a deep taste of the hot tea. It was better than anything he had previously tasted, better even than whiskey. What did it taste like? Well, at first it was tarry, as if the person making the tea had infused by mistake some stray ends of well-tarred rope. But it was penetrating too, and a wee bit salty, and very rich and lingering. McKeag noticed that its taste dwelled in the mouth long after that of an ordinary tea. It was a man’s tea, deep and subtle and blended in some rugged place. “What is it?” he asked. Haversham pointed to the brown canister, and McKeag said, “I can’t read.” Haversham indicated the lettering and the scene of tea-pickers in India. “Lapsang souchong,” he said. “Best tea in the world.” Impulsively McKeag asked, “You have some for sale?” “Of course. We’re the agents.” It was a tea, Haversham explained, blended in India especially for men who had known the sea. It was cured in a unique way which the makers kept secret. “But smoke and tar must obviously play a part,” he said. It came normally from India to London, but the English traders in Oregon imported theirs from China. “How long would a can like that last?” McKeag asked, cautiously again. “It’ll keep forever … with the top on.” “I mean, how many cups?” “I use it sparingly. It would last me a year.” “I’ll take two cans,” McKeag said, without asking the price. It was expensive, and as he tucked his small supply of coins back into his belt, Haversham explained, “The secret in making good lapsang souchong lies in heating the cup first. Heat it well. Then the flavor expands.” McKeag hid the canisters at the bottom of his gear, for he knew they were precious.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“augury.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“acidulous”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“averred”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“refulgent.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“desultory”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“sagacious,”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“factotum,”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“language could be most robust, with words that would have shocked ordinary Baptists or Presbyterians. They particularly liked to use barnyard terms,”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“omnivorously”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“acidulous,”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“parfleche”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“pestilential”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“desultorily”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“Las Mañanitas,” the birthday song with that totally strange beginning “This is the song King David sang,” captivated him, and he always sang along. “It must be the strangest birthday song in the world,” he told me, “and the best.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“senescent”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“prehensile”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“prodigal”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“The universities were judged not on their libraries or their research centers or their courses in philosophy, but only on their capacity to buy a football team, most of whose members did not come from the home state or reside in it. Often they were not even true students connected with the university; they were young men dedicated principally to the job of landing contracts with acknowledged professional teams after their so-called graduations from the institutions of which they had never been a real part.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“This nation is running out of everything. We forgot the fact that we’ve always existed in a precarious balance, and now if we don’t protect all the components, we’ll collapse.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial

“In some families the rider always arrives too late, no matter how soon he starts.”
― James A. Michener, Centennial