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All Quotes by author - Homer Hickam
" After I'd gotten a year under my belt in college, I thought I'd outgrown my home. "
Year
Belt
Thought
" 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.' "
Rocket
Marketing
Film
" 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. "
My Life
Eyes
Enough
" A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true. "
Be True
Story
True
" Boeing, LockMart, and hundreds of other companies, large and small, work in the space business, and they also create new techniques and technology; but they'd be nowhere if NASA and the Department of Defense hadn't shown the way by funding the first big rockets and satellites. "
Space
Business
Technology
" 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.' "
Rocket
Story
Up
" 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. "
Ahead
Great
Moon
" Glenn's 1962 Mercury flight was fraught with dramatics, from his 'Zero G and I feel fine!' exultation upon entering orbit to his reentry with what was feared was a faulty heat shield. After he safely splashed down, the nation erupted with applause and gratitude not seen since Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic. "
Gratitude
Feel
Flight
" 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! "
Love
Questions
Always
" 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. "
Sleep
Evening
Steel
" 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. "
Look
Want
Involved
" I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V. , yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills. "
Rose
Company
Phone
" 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. "
Work
Way
Dreams
" I have the best fans of any author in the country and they deserve the best from me, too! "
Deserve
Too
Country
" 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. "
Sky
Rocket
October
" 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. "
Government
Creativity
Within
" 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. "
Country
Good
Great
" My dad was a miner, but he was very much an intellectual. He loved to read. "
Read
Much
Intellectual
" My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward. "
Trapped
Eye
Father
" 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. "
Energy
Black
Mountains
" 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. "
Government
NASA
Wild
" 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. "
True
Health
Safety
" One thing we've learned about space is that the human body starts to fall apart after relatively short exposures to microgravity. "
Learned
Space
Short
" Persevere with a plan to reach your passion, and life will be good. "
Will
Good
Reach
" 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. "
Building
NASA
Space
" 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. "
Truth
Truth Is
Technology
" Rational thought will always trump medieval dogma. "
Always
Dogma
Rational
" 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. "
Success
Good
Passion
" '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. "
Country
Engineers
Reason
" 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. "
Best
You
Start
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