Owen King Quotes

Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

My father and brothers were coal miners.

The coal miners are working. But there's more than just coal miners in West Virginia.

I come from a family of coal miners.

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

I’m not going to go down in coal mines like Mrs. Roosevelt.

You can’t mine coal with bayonets!

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

West Virginia built this nation... we deserve respect.

I am the son of a mine worker.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

If all you have is coal, that's the only thing that we have. Don't hate the coal miner for trying to get the only decent job that we have in West Virginia that can allow them to feed their family.

I'm lucky to have football. My father was 16 when he worked in the mines. That's practically a child, going down the mines.

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

I was raised here in Logan County, where I was blessed to be in a family that had over 200 years of United Mine Workers of America experience.

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.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine, then, before God, I assert that those who consume coal, and you and I who benefit from that service, owe protection to those men [the miners] first, and we owe security to their families after, if they die. I say it! I proclaim it! And I care not who in heaven or hell oppose it!