Patricia Riggen Quotes

My father and brothers were coal miners.

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.

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.

Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

Mining is a dangerous profession. There's no way to make a mine completely safe: These are the words owners have always used to excuse needless deaths and the words miners use to prepare for them.

Many mines in the world are unsafe. They are dangerous as hell.

I never went into the mine. But I saw my father and other men coming out, day after day, their faces and bodies covered in soot. It looked very hard and dangerous.

I don't want to ever minimize the danger of working in a mine.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Every single Federal mine safety initiative has been written with the blood of miners.

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

I am the son of a mine worker.

Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It's exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy.

A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: 'This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people'.

I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.

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.

We had had several mine disasters where workers, some of the workers were rescued. It was, you know, who was lucky and who weren't. Some would find the air pockets But, in this one, bam, it was just, everybody was gone and it greatly depressed the state.

Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country's history.

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.

And during my college, at the end of the junior year I worked in a mine.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.

Chile's mines are very dangerous; the country has a lot of earthquakes.