The Fires of Spring Quotes

“For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE.
But if a man happens to find himself—if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he will no longer retreat, the degree to which he can surrender his inner life to some woman, the secret reservoirs of his determination, the extent of his dedication, the depth of his feeling for beauty, his honest and unpostured goals—then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“He found that love is never to be defined, that it grows and changes with every year of life, that each person knows it as a different miracle... Nothing can shame it. Nothing can make it more splendid than it already is. Shared, wantoned or hidden forever, it can fill a life. There is no understanding love, and there is no defeat so precious as trying. No aspect of life is more complex, and none so simple. A look, a word, and the heart is torn forever; a touch, and it is mended. Love is brave and cowardly. In the same person it is secret and garrulous. But above all, love establishes its own rules and no man can know its complete manifestation in the heart of another.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I've known were the laziest. Never work because it's expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don't do any more.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“Maybe books are best, because you don't have to have money to read... A man can travel all over the world and come back the same kind of fool he was when he started. You can't do that with books.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“He wondered how men could live till they were seventy if they endured such passions as he had known that fifteenth summer, and although he knew many things...he did not even guess that men are able to live because slowly, one by one, they snuff out the fires of spring until only embers burn in white dignity, in loneliness, and often in cold despair.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“I am sure old men forget what it was to be young and to be wholly in love. Not even I can remember those breathless moments. That's why they give old men important jobs and big salaries and orchestras to lead. To pay us back for the terrible loss we have sustained.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“(I)f you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living?”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“I never found a way to tell a good man from an evil one except by what he did. It's popular now to say all men are good and evil both. But I don't believe that. Men are on one side or the other. Of course, sometimes a good man will do an evil thing. But he regrets it. And so will you, whenever you do wrong. And if you do wrong too often, regrets come so easily that you forget what wrong is. Then you've become an evil man, and you're all tied up inside, and you work and fight against others. And do you know why? Because you have no peace in your heart to satisfy you when you are alone.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“But thinking is something different, altogether! Think always as if the hot hand of hell were grabbing for you. Think to the limit of your mind. Imagine, dream, hope, want things, drive yourself to goodness. Whatever you do...do it to the absolute best of your ability. Never take the easy way where thinking is concerned.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“He was reminded that men may be angels, but they are animals, too. They are driven by uncontrollable forces and only the love of other people makes it possible for them to survive. Men are lonely and are stricken in the night. They lock their jaws against themselves. They scream like animals, and even though they ridicule love and the forces of destruction, they are themselves theatres for the operation of such forces.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“A novel…is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience… You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there's nothing you can't do, if you do it with passion.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“That's the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“And wherever you go on the face of the earth have the humility to think that a thousand years ago someone pretty much like you stood there and a thousand years from now a boy like you will be there. And in two thousand years boys and places and people will have been pretty much the same.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“Never be ashamed of anything! If you've made a fool of yourself, just don't do it again. But being ashamed is only being a fool twice for the same reason.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“We all hurt other people, especially those we love...civilized people were the ones who had learned to hurt according to rules.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“But in spring, of course, any place is beautiful, because in spring fires leap from your heart, and you can see things that aren't there.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“David, the world is not an evil place. Never believe that. You will see wars and famines and betrayals. But the world itself cannot be evil. It’s just that evil people, having nothing kind within themselves to feed upon, are driven like mad animals to accomplishment. So you’ll always find that one evil person makes more noise than four good men.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“With profound shock he realized that of himself he was nothing... By his friends he had been taught to understand music and art and logic and sportsmanship and even the rudiments of honesty. He had been a formless thing until the affectionate interest of others had made him into a sentient being.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“A young boy who has not fallen desperately in love has missed getting started in the world of feeling. At any age love is wrong only if it means nothing... You must be the criterion of any love...There's only one test... Does the love you feel make you a bigger and a stronger person?... (I)f any love makes you stronger and more determined to share, then it's much finer than most people ever attain.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring

“(N)either a man's greatness nor his goodness can be measured by the happiness he has attained.”
― James A. Michener, The Fires of Spring