Home > Work > Rocket Boys (Coalwood #1)
1 " 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 (Coalwood #1)
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " All I’ve done is give you a book,” she said. “You have to have the courage to learn what’s inside it. "
5 " I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother. "
6 " 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 "
7 " We had to start somewhere, either succeed or fail, and then build what we knew as we went along. "
8 " blue suede shoes "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " Anybody raised here belongs here. You can't belong anywhere else "
