Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is better to confess ignorance than provide it.
Rational thought will always trump medieval dogma.
A rocket won't fly unless somebody lights the fuse!
Persevere with a plan to reach your passion, and life will be good.
To be a great nation and a great people, you have to do great things.
My dad was a miner, but he was very much an intellectual. He loved to read.
Always I try to write about people. People are interested in other people always.
After I'd gotten a year under my belt in college, I thought I'd outgrown my home.
I have the best fans of any author in the country and they deserve the best from me, too!
I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.
I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.
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.
One thing we've learned about space is that the human body starts to fall apart after relatively short exposures to microgravity.
When legislators do something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there's always the suspicion that they're in somebody's pocket.
When I began to write my books about Coalwood, I was surprised to discover, upon reflection, that it wasn't an ordinary place at all.
My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.
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.
NASA's charter is to give Americans the means to get into the wild, black yonder, beyond even the grasp of the federal government that funded it.
I have always found the best way to live is to be optimistic and energetic and willing to work hard for my dreams as well as the dreams of others.
For a country like ours that needs to stay ahead of the world or go under, we must do great, ambitious things - like going to the moon - to survive.
If politicians want to save money, that's fine. They can look for all the wasteful spending they want, but not where the lives of miners are involved.
Remember, it isn't the dreamers who have good lives - it's the doers. Remember also what I call the three Ps of success: passion, planning, and perseverance.
I always give a little talk before I sign books and ask for questions. I love the Q&A sessions. We have a lot of fun at my book signings. I make sure of that!
A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.
The key to not getting rejected if you're writing for a magazine, is to know to read that magazine and know everything about them before you ever make a submission.
Tired of burning fossil fuel and polluting the planet? The moon is covered with helium 3, an isotope from the sun that is the perfect fuel for clean fusion reactors.
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.
Of all the federal agencies created by Congress, one of the true success stories is the 'Mine Safety and Health Administration', which grew out of a bipartisan effort in 1977.
I have never been able to understand anyone on this planet who lacks a need for knowledge. Is it not God's greatest gift to us all, this capacity to think, to wonder, to imagine?
I want to make the conquest of the moon the United States' goal for the 21st century and, through that goal, to make us a great and good and happy country for generations to come.
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.
Interestingly, 'October Sky' is an anagram of 'Rocket Boys', the same letters just moved around. This was discovered by director Joe Johnston using an anagram program on his computer.
Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took off my shoes at night.
I've seen the government up close and personal, and for the most part, it's inefficient and hidebound, and it stifles creativity in any industry it clutches within its well-meaning but slimy tentacles.
After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that 'Rocket Boys' as a movie title would not attract the female over-age-thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as 'October Sky.'
The mining towns I describe in the 'Helium-3' novel series are not unlike Coalwood, but there is one major difference: Those towns, rather than being located in the Appalachian coalfields, are on the moon.
I ate supper after Dad saw the evening shift down the shaft, and I went to sleep to the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of an arc welder at the little tipple machine shop during the hoot-owl shift.
Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard... I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it.
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.
Personally, I've got bigger hopes for NASA. I will stipulate it should keep putting telescopes in space so we can figure out where we fit in the universe, and it should also keep building those little robots that can and do.
When the moon was first visited in 1969, the astronauts brought back a treasure trove of unique minerals. Contained within specimens was an isotope called Helium-3, which turns out to be the perfect fuel for fusion reactors.
The time frame is summer 1961, a year after the gold medal in the National Science Fair. I always saw my 'Coalwood' books as a trilogy. This book finishes the story of my life in Coalwood. I think it's the best of the three.
Despite the ills of our society, we largely live among compassionate, kind and optimistic people who are striving to do good. [...] Learn how to be happy and keep this in mind: You can't be happy unless you stop being afraid.
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.
What kind of country just recycles its old money, reminisces about what used to be, and doesn't know how to weld, to machine, to cast or to bolt things together? Not one that's on a path to future greatness, that's for certain.
Rather than being an impediment, NASA can and should be the driver of commerce, the provider of the technology necessary to make some big money in space. The truth is that private enterprise already has a huge presence up there.
'Rocket Boys,' for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it's set in a little coal-mining town. That's why NASA likes it - most of the engineers come from towns very similar.
My father use to say if coal died, the country died. He was right. Our economy rests on the back of the coal miner. If we did not have the black diamonds of the mountains to burn, we would lose more than half of the nation's energy reserves.
The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.