Quotes by Journalists - Page 16

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
be as good as our first honeymoon?’ Friday 7 October A
Matt Rudd
Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
Walt Whitman
There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.
Christopher Hitchens
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...
Gabriel García Márquez
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
Ernest Hemingway
You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people - which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.
Albert Camus
Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.
Michael Pollan
Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
Ian Fleming
Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long?
Kay Mills
On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
Hunter S. Thompson
I may not be perfect, but God knows I'm trying . . . and God knowing should count for something.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
My generation of Canadians grew up believing that if we were very good or very smart or both we would some day graduate from Canada.
Robert Fulford
And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy's eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head
Linda Grant
The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist.
Glenn Greenwald
...Myths aren’t fairy tales or legends—they’re an honest attempt to explain mysteries...
John Geddes
You build a thing of beauty, and then the peasants storm the castle, hooting and chanting and calling you a heretic.
Vic S. Sussman
The only thing for it is to use men for sex and never let any of them get so close they could hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.
Matt Haig
I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.
Pitigrilli
At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.
Svetlana Alexievich
Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.
Peter Hitchens
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.
Oliver Bullough
It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?
Matt Haig
The only way to find out if you can write is to set aside a certain period every day and try. Save enough money to give yourself six months to be a full-time writer. Work every day and the pages will pile up.
Judith Krantz
The art of art the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity: nothing is better than simplicity.
Walt Whitman
I want him to live if HE wants to live. If he doesn't, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me..... we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.
Jojo Moyes
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Edward R. Murrow
When you name your child after a grotesque gigantic creature known for slaughtering hundreds of innocents for the sole purpose of entertainment (okay so they were illegal immigrants who entered his realm) you must have a slight idea how that would turn out.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
Hope is a most beautiful drug.
Jeremy Mercer
Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about. When she came out feeling no less anxious, as this time, something had gone wrong. The basic contract had been broken.
John Lanchester
The app saved three minutes of my time. But in the process, it cut a neighborhood business out of the economic equation. And, in a way, I had cut off myself from the inconvenient, maddening, but all-too-necessary messiness of human interaction.
Nick Bilton
Don't confuse being stimulating with being blunt.
Barbara Walters
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
José Saramago
Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, “Diable! Diable!” And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of “Diable!” They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.
Cole Alpaugh
Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow,t An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,High in the purer, happier air.
Walt Whitman
I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.
Pamela Bone
And all at once he saw before him a precipice, as it were without bottom. He was a patrician, a military tribune, a powerful man; but above every power of that world to which he belonged was a madman whose will and malignity it was impossible to foresee. Only such people as the Christians might cease to reckon with Nero or fear him, people for whom this whole world, with its separations and sufferings, was as nothing; people for whom death itself was as nothing. All others had to tremble before him. The terrors of the time in which they lived showed themselves to Vinicius in all their monstrous extent...Vinicius felt, for the first time in life, that either the world must change and be transformed, or life would become impossible altogether. He understood also this, which a moment before had been dark to him, that in such times only Christians could be happy.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.
Tracy Kidder
We once again see the painful reality of the spineless political intelligentsia
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
Mass production keeps the world divided between consumer and producer. Demassification of production may hasten the speed towards an era of prosumers.
Michael Petch
...if you don't regard your word as a sacred covenant, then there is nothing in you I can honor ...
John Geddes
Marriage, n.: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
Robert Cormier
All the bees knew Sugar; they carried their feelings for her with them in their genes, they could sense her from more than half a mile away and would no sooner find her a threat than fly to the moon. But Elizabeth the First sensed Grady Parkes from half a mile away too, and her resulting hum was not one of blissful content. It was his smell, partly: an aftershave, with base notes of tobacco and cedar and a hint of bitter herbs, and his natural scent, which was too sour for Elizabeth the First's liking. She registered him as something to watch out for and passed this on through the realm.
Sarah-Kate Lynch
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
Christopher Hitchens
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
Tahir Shah
I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.
Mitch Albom
If you think it’s offensive that I call alleged biblical miracles ridiculous, you should ask yourself whether or not it’s ridiculous to insist that Muhammad flew on a winged horse. Or that the earth was hatched from a cosmic egg? Or that Xenu, the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of his people to earth 75 million years ago and killed them using hydrogen bombs? These are all religious beliefs of others, but that doesn't mean calling them ridiculous is an insult - it's an objective fact until proven otherwise.
David G. McAfee
He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.
David Halberstam
A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.
Scott Douglas
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.
Lauren Beukes
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
Sebastian Junger
I didn't realize it until now, but I don't really know anything about them, or what kind of people they are, really. You can't see inside a person's heart.
Koushun Takami