Quotes by Journalists - Page 141

It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
Mitch Albom
She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. "My God!" Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. "What I wouldn’t have given for a love like this!
Gabriel García Márquez
One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we’re idling in front of our computer screens.
Joshua Foer
There is an inverse relationship between control and trust. Trust is more of a two-way exchange than most people, especially those in power, realize. Leaders in government, news media, universities, and corporations think they can own trust, when, of course, trust is given to them. Trust is earned with difficulty and lost with ease. When those institutions treat constituents like masses of fools, children, miscreants,or prisoners, when they simply don't listen,it's unlikely they will engender warm feelings of mutual respect. Trust is an act of opening up. It's a mutual relationship of transparency and sharing. The more ways you find to reveal yourself and listen to others, the more you will build trust, which is your brand.
Jeff Jarvis
The best listeners listen between the lines.
Nina Malkin
To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise
David Finkel
The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.
Katherine Boo
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
George Orwell
The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out.
Clara E. Laughlin
...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
In Chinese the word for crisis is weiji composed of the character wei which means danger and ji which means opportunity.
Jan Wong
There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that.
George F. Will
The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
Ernest Hemingway
And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
Omar El Akkad
I am a massive slag!" I think to myself, in a motivational way. "I'm a Lady Sex Adventuress! I'm a Pirate of Privates! I'm a swashfuckler!" ... I think of "Teenage Whore" by Courtney Love as my personal anthem.
Caitlin Moran
The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.
David Halberstam
Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins.
Gideon Haigh
Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.
Ruth Rendell
Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32)
Lionel Shriver
I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.
Mitch Albom
The deaf people there with balloons, holding them up and feeling the vibrations of the balloons to the Germs, all these fuckin' great bands, and using these balloons and dancing around. For a tough old punk, it just made your heart -- it gave you that beautiful feeling. They loved the music, and we were making money for them.
Jack Boulware
A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.
Naomi Klein
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
Theodore White
[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement.
Gail Collins
You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.
Rubén Darío
I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.
Andrew Sullivan
It is not, how one thinks. Indeed, it is, how one executes that.
Ehsan Sehgal
...I worship at the temple of your body and without you, I'd have no art...
John Geddes
Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.
Tom Vanderbilt
Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.
Albert Camus
And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.
George Orwell
He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
You can get in a car in Maine and drive all the way to California and hear the same Top 40 songs on the same chain broadcasters,” bemoaned the report.
John Seabrook
Evolution is necessary for ones progress…. resisting it could make one sore in mind and spirit and then unable to enjoy the journey.
Jon Scott
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P.J. O'Rourke
The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.
Panashe Chigumadzi
alone doesn't mean lonely. It just means alone. It just means that for now, you're on your own, and that's not a terrible thing.
Hemal Jhaveri
My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.
Trevor Cole
What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.
Henry Hazlitt
Stately and commanding, the house I found on Sacramento Street, in Lower Pacific Heights, was an architectural jewel; tour buses drove down the street several times a day and the guides pointed out our Victorian “painted lady” not just for its curb appeal but also for its lucky survival of the earthquake. Meticulously renovated, the house had a layout that I was sure would work perfectly: a three-room suite on the lower level with a bathroom and laundry room for my mother, living space on the next level, and, on the top floor, bedrooms for Zoë and me. The master bedroom was large enough to double as my office. Moreover, it seemed symbolic that we should find a three-story nineteenth-century Victorian, whose original intention was to house multiple generations. My mother couldn’t have been more pleased. She started calling our experiment “our year in Provence.” In the face of naysayers, I chose to embrace the reaction of a friend who was living in Beijing: “How Chinese of you!” she said upon hearing the news. When I told my mother, she was delighted. “What have the Chinese got on us?” she declared. And I agreed. The Chinese revere their elderly. If they could live happily with multiple generations under one roof, so could we.
Katie Hafner
Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.
Donald Van de Mark
The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.
Naomi Wolf
You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group.
Jojo Moyes
Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.
Clarice Lispector
A delightfully droll look at how the other half lives from a pet pooch's point of view.
Kam Williams
All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
George Orwell
Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!
Ambrose Bierce
Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.
Matt Haig
The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.
Amanda Ripley
What will you do?" Eva would ask him. "I don't know," he would say. He ruled out law, because he didn't like lawyers, and he ruled out medicine because he couldn't take the sight of blood. "What will you do?" It was only through default that the best professor I ever had became a teacher.
Mitch Albom from "Tuesdays with Morrie"
Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
You don’t have to believe in karma, (I didn’t). But you can bet your ass that karma will have been keeping an eye on you.
Garry Crystal
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.
Christopher Morley
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
John Hersey
...Use your finger to trace the scar upon my chest- I lied - it wasn't a knife wound, but a scrape from a nail sliding under a fence to see you...
John Geddes
I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
Joan Didion
When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take hard work to make the words of the Declaration of Independence mean what they said. Ellen and William Craft were willing to do their part.
Joy Hakim
Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.
Meghan Daum
Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage-and that's the same thing.
George Horace Lorimer