Homer Hickam > Quotes

“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“All I’ve done is give you a book,” she said. “You have to have the courage to learn what’s inside it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“Not much comes easy in this world, Sonny. If it does, it's best to be suspicious of it. It's probably not worth much.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“You must completely dedicate yourselves to it. To do less will be to let down your country, your state, your parents, your teachers, and ultimately, yourselves. Remember this: The only good citizen is the well-educated citizen.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.”
― Homer H. Hickam, Rocket Boys

“There are two things every woman really wants: one, she wants to know that a man really loves her, and two, that he isn't going to stop.”
― Homer Hickman

“But that’s what kismet is. It makes us careen off in odd directions from which we learn not only what life is about but what it is for. This journey may be nothing less than your chance to discover these things.” “You’re”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“The way I see it, if everybody ran from bad things instead of trying to stop them, bad things would be all there is.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator

“I didn’t care…about heroes who could read minds or walk through walls or do magic. The heroes I liked had courage and knew more real stuff than those who opposed them.”
― Homer Hickam Jr.

“There’s a plan. If you’re willing to fight it hard enough, you can make it detour for a while, but you’re still going to end up wherever God wants you to be. G”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“We had to start somewhere, either succeed or fail, and then build what we knew as we went along.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“A man can't hit a woman and stay a man. He becomes a loathsome thing, even to himself. But the woman who stays with such a man panders to his darkness. They both risk their souls.”
― Homer Hickam, The Coalwood Way: A Memoir

“Hemingway reached over and took Elsie’s hand. “Do you know Dylan Thomas? I have always admired his take on death. Like he, I intend to go raging against the dying of the light.” “Dear,”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“Maybe that’s what life is,” Elsie said. “Mysteries atop mysteries. We think we know everything but we don’t know anything, not really.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“Anybody raised here belongs here. You can't belong anywhere else”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“Even now, Coalwood endures, and no one, nor careless industry or overzealous government, can ever completely destroy it--not while we who once lived there may recall our life among its places, or especially remember rockets that once leapt into the air propelled not by physics but by the vibrant love of an honorable people, and the instruction of a dear teacher, and the dreams of boys.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives> I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine.”
― Homer Hickam

“So, you met Steinbeck,” mused Hemingway over his port after the women had left. “It is a fateful peculiarity that you might meet him and me at virtually the same time. To what do you attribute that, Homer?” “I don’t know, sir,” Homer answered. “Just the way it worked out, I guess.” “Don’t you believe it. There are no coincidences in life. Although the big God of the Hebrews might be the greatest of them, I believe there are small gods who watch out and sometimes determine our fate. I believe they also like to have a little fun with us from time to time. Kismet. You heard of it?” “I”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“Any time a man hits a woman, it's no longer between him and her.”
― Homer Hickam, The Dinosaur Hunter

“It didn't matter if three hundred million years passed, our part in the timeline would be there, affecting everything that was to come.”
― Homer Hickam, The Dinosaur Hunter

“Most things take more time than we believe they will. But, now, what about love? Will love take more time than you think?” “I don’t know anything about love.” “That is true,” she agreed. “Yet, every mile you travel on this journey is for this thing you don’t know anything about.” Homer”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“He reached into the box to pick up a smooth, curiously shaped object that I thought looked like the end of a leg bone. I was disappointed when he said,
“This is a sandstone concretion. Not a bone.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I have a PhD in paleontology and a master's degree in geology, Mike. I know bones and rocks.”

- Exchange between Mike and Pick”
― Homer Hickam, The Dinosaur Hunter

“Let me find you. If you don’t, I will still look. If you won’t, I will still look. If you can’t, I will still look. It is the looking that finds the love, Not the finding. Homer”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“As Elsie showered, she realized she had learned something. She was attracted to the kind of man Denver was. He drove fast and was dangerous and handsome but, she reflected, he was also, in his own way, needy. If he wasn’t showing off to a pretty girl, it was Elsie’s guess he was fairly miserable. Elsie was happy she didn’t have to put up with such a man all the way to Florida. Homer, despite all his many flaws—mostly, she had to concede, having to do with his good character—well, he would do just fine for that chore.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“It was during a strike when I first saw hate on a man’s face. Hate is an awful thing. It gets inside you and makes you do things you swear you’d never do.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“My agent in Miami told me you were coming. I like to keep up with who’s coming to my island, especially government and railroad men. Typically, I don’t like either one but considering your girl here and your car and the fact that you have an alligator with a rooster on his back, I would guess you might be at least interesting. Name’s Ernest. Some people call me Hem.” After a brief pause he added, “As in Hemingway.” Homer”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“At that moment, it occurred to Elsie that it was men who caused most of the problems in the world and that included the Captain, Homer, Malcolm, Karl Marx, and even Buddy Ebsen. It made her angry, that women had not only to bear the children and raise them, but also put up with men who only saw the world through a man’s eyes.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“But that’s what kismet is. It makes us careen off in odd directions from which we learn not only what life is about but what it is for. This journey may be nothing less than your chance to discover these things.”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home

“Sometimes now, I wake at night, thinking I have heard the sound of my father's footsteps on the stairs or the shuffling boots and low murmur of the hoot-owl shift going to work. In that half-world between sleep and wakefulness, I can almost hear the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of the arc welder at the little machine shop by the tipple. But it is only a trick of my imagination; nearly everything that I knew in Coalwood is gone.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“Nothing on this planet could slink like a fox, Mom said, except maybe a politician in a beer joint.”
― Homer Hickam, Sky of Stone