Quotes by Journalists - Page 153

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republic
Christopher Hitchens
Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong
Kathryn Schulz
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
H.L. Mencken
A very beautiful woman hardly ever leaves a clear-cut impression of features and shape in the memory: usually there remains only an aura of living colour.
William Bolitho
Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
Lionel Shriver
I am condemned to a theatrical destiny.
Gabriel García Márquez
To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn't make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.
Eric Weiner
In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.
Daniel Alarcón
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
Walt Whitman
(She) didn't believe in resilience. She believed in imagination.
Rene Denfeld
It's exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying.
Ron Suskind
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A Certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Joan Didion
Always, God’s timing is the right time. Things happen when they have to happen and you only realise it later.” – Ernesto.
Paul Alkazraji
We see them most when we are o nnthe outside looking in
Jonah Lehrer
The library was the best place in the world.
Anita Anand
I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red weld is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.
Gayle Forman
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
Christopher Hitchens
Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Live for today. Multitudes of people have failed to live for today. ... What they have had within their grasp today they have missed entirely because only the future has intrigued them.
William Allen White
When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.
Mitch Albom
...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....
John Geddes
This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.
Rick Bragg
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
Ernest Hemingway
...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.
Rachel Friedman
A lawyer's empathy for her client deepens when she realizes that she has only seen the last couple of phases of his decline. How hard it must his initial adjustment have been to his loss of freedom?
Ron Suskind
Have you heard," he said "that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-" He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. "But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a sip of water."She nodded, understanding his point, but he pressed it."Learn those five phrases, Miss Sweeney," he said.
Masha Hamilton
I think that the great trick in life, wherever you are in the journey, is to do what you love and let the universe support it. When we do what we love, every day is a holiday.
Robert Moss
You can see them alongside the shuffleboard courts in Florida or on the porches of the old folks' homes up north.... They are in love they have always been in love although sometimes they would have denied it. And because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them even their own failures.
Ernest Havemann
While the world has found the right names for all chronic mental diseases, I believe poetry is also a brain dysfunction, yet the only one that owns itself the mastery for the cure. Isn’t it lovely to say, “He/She suffers of Poetry?”.
Ioana-Cristina Casapu
You walked into my life when I was nineteen years old. You were the only man I ever loved - the only man I ever hope to love. You took everything we did together, everything we were to each other, and scorched it to nothing: left it a cloud of ash.
Laura Barnett
God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological termsI'm a crude existential malpracticeAnd you are a diet of worms
James Fenton
The decrease in the number of killings doesn’t make any difference if the society has to sleep with the ghosts of the old devil.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.
Rivka Galchen
Being brave is only standing up when you're afraid.
Jon Steele
To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.
David Brooks
knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials
Kathryn Schulz
This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.
Lionel Shriver
Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.
Emily Matchar
The lamb, having survived the storm unharmed and no longer afraid, came up to Jesus and put its mouth to his lips, there was no sniffing, one touch was all that was needed. Jesus opened his eyes, saw the lamb, then the livid sky like a black hand blocking whatever light remained. The olive tree still burned. His bones ached when he tried to move, but at least he was in one piece, if that can be said of a body so fragile that it takes only a clap of thunder to knock it to the ground. He sat up with some effort and reassured himself, more by touch than by sight, that he was neither burned nor paralyzed, none of his bones were broken, and apart from a loud buzzing in his head as insistent as the drone of a trumpet, he was all right. He drew the lamb to him and said, Don’t be afraid, He only wanted to show you that you would have been dead by now if that was His will, and to show me that it was not I who saved your life but He. One last rumble of thunder slowly tore the air like a sigh, while below, the white patch of the flock seemed a beckoning oasis.Struggling to overcome his weakness, Jesus descended the slope. The lamb, kept on its cord simply as a precaution, trotted at his side like a little dog.
José Saramago
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Christopher Hitchens
I don't care if your the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you're no paragon in my book, but the same as a zebra or gazelle - a source of protein. In fact, I'd rather hunt you, because you're slow and feeble.
Philip Caputo
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..
Gabriel García Márquez
With each beat, the heart pumps nearly three ounces of blood into the arteries--seventy-five to ninety gallons an hour when the body is at rest.
Ariel Gore
The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you're doing.
Neil Strauss
Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.
John McPhee
Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and forboding.
Norman Cousins
Garcia wondered why people with JESUS stickers on their bumper always drove twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. If God was my co-pilot, he thought, I'd be doing a hundred and twenty.
Carl Hiaasen
As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.
Jacob Weisberg
Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date—one that you can’t see until she tells you she’s leaving, and then she’s gone.
Laura Miller
The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
Mitch Albom
Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Because of Jesus’ supposed predestination, God would have had to choose the people who would kill and betray his son, choose the method by which he would be killed (crucifixion), and the time at which the event would occur. Those guilty of killing Jesus would therefore be simply carrying out God’s wishes without the free will to have chosen a path for themselves.
David G. McAfee
Prayer doesn’t work. Perhaps it makes the believer feel better (in the same way that meditation or deep thought would), but prayer doesn’t actually affect the external world. Not only is it ineffective, but it is also a very narcissistic practice… why would a 'God' change its 'Divine Plan' to accommodate any person’s wishes?
David G. McAfee
There was no one to blame but the mighty, ruthless stranger. Thus was complexity reduced to demonology, which is a defining feature of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, or, indeed, any "anti-ism.
Josef Joffe
You'd expect academics, people who are by training comfortable with complexity, to be the most resistant to the idea that we're shaped by any single factor. In fact, they are often the worst offenders. Immersed in their own research, shaped by their own work, many logically see everything else as a natural extension of it.
Nicholas Day
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
Georges Clémenceau