Quotes by Journalists - Page 165

Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.
Matt Ridley
Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it's pretty hard when you've got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis.
A.J. Jacobs
Secrets were never good. They were supposed to protect people, but they never did. They always made things worse.
Gemma Malley
Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.
David Brooks
It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.
Geraldine Brooks
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.
H.L. Mencken
In my meditations, I find that nothing in life counts more than the happiness we can give others, the good that we can do. This is what we must teach our children, to think of others more than they think of themselves, for it is in this way they will find the most noble satisfaction of all. ~ Maurice Drouhin writing to his wife from prison in 1941
Don Kladstrup
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
Tahir Shah
She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.
Mark Helprin
I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: "Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant." I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, "I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it.
Robert Moss
you cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ...disturbing my placid universe...marking the landscape within me ...
John Geddes
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor.
John Connolly
Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship.
Drew Magary
But you need to make sure that the last thing you remember about today isn't that you fell down, it's that you got back up again. That's what we do when bad things happen to us.
Michael Rowe
Last night, lost in spaces between star—bays and lakes of clouds, I tossed and turned looking for you
John Geddes
Greed is a suit that’s tailor made: it finds a way to fit every lifestyle, no matter how much or how little you earn.
Casey N. Cep
Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.
Edna Buchanan
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
You have no idea how big the other fellow's troubles are.
B.C. Forbes
Damnation is eternal. That’s the whole point. Otherwise, what good would it do you?
Forrest Carr
It is too late." The old man shook his head. "It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be." He smiled. "There is a plan, Dor.
Mitch Albom
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
Ernest Hemingway
David was at his best in group settings, soldier enough to join in the raucous jests, king enough to make it matter that he remembered some moments of bravery or sacrifice, and praised each man accordingly.
Geraldine Brooks
Well, you may think you have all your ducks in a row, that your life is sorted. You might have the perfect house, the perfect job, the perfect life, nothing to worry about and then something can come along and end all of that in a second. It’s absolutely beyond your control. You can’t plan for unexpected things. And then people start saying, as a way of coping with this latest catastrophe, that it was meant to happen, it was fate. It’s not fate, it’s not some greater force out there. It’s just life and you cannot control life.
Garry Crystal
Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,Rude by day and lewd by night…Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name's delirium.
Byron Rufus Newton
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
George Orwell
To believe all you have to do is look at the sky.
Kathryn E. Livingston
Josie, like Gretchen, isn't afraid of blood. What woman would be?
Chelsea Cain
The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.
Ernest Hemingway
They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
But you understand the relationship between pi and Gaussian curvature, right? pg 264
Danyl McLauchlan
I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.
Jojo Moyes
To realize the importance the imagination could have in friendship, to understand its immense power for bringing us together in a way.
Stuart Miller
Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.
Edward Humes
There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.
Chuck Klosterman
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.
Kuba Wojewódzki
There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.
Curtis Bill Pepper
Nations like individuals have to limit their objectives or take the consequences.
James Reston
Over my slumber your loving watch keep - Rock me to sleep mother rock me to sleep.
Elizabeth Akers Allen
Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices
Amin Maalouf
This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.
Mark O'Connell
...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
Michael Lewis
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
Arthur Machen
Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
Charles Duhigg
It seems like it might go on for a while, so Tausolo takes a seat and looks around the sergeant's cubicle. There's not much to see, since the guy just arrived at the WTB, only a blank form tacked to a wall that looks like every other army form in the world."Hurt Feelings Report," it is titled. "Whiner's name," it says under that. "Which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?" it says under that. "Is there permanent feeling damage?" "Did you require a 'tissue' for tears?" "Has this resulted in a traumatic brain injury?""Reason for filing this report," it says under that. "Mark all that apply." "I am a wimp." "I am a crybaby." "I want my mommy." "I was told that I am not a hero." "Narrative," it says under that. "Tell us in your own sissy words how your feelings were hurt." Finally at the bottom of the form:We, as the Army, take hurt feelings seriously. If you don't have someone who can give you a hug and make things all better, please let us know and we will promptly dispatch a "hugger" to you ASAP. In the event we are unable to find a "hugger" we will notify the fire department and request that they send fire personnel to your location. If you are in need of supplemental support, upon written request, we will make every reasonable effort to provide you with a "blankey," a "binky" and/or a bottle if you so desire.
David Finkel
Self-government is our right," [Roger Casement] declared. "A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself - than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours. . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel . . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.
Adam Hochschild
Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.
Laurence Gonzales
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. (in "The Sporting Spirit", Tribune, GB, London, December 1945)
George Orwell
In the 'Life' of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. "She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting," Cross wrote.
Rebecca Mead
When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.
Ian Fleming
And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
Oliver Burkeman
YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: I would always tell him, “Layne [Staley], why don’t you take off, go to some deserted island, hire the best counselors, and just kick this shit? Go for six months if you have to.” And his rebuttal was, “Johnny, I have celebrity status and I have a lot of money. I could fly planes out to deliver me the dope if I wanted to — and that’s what I would do. I can’t escape.
Greg Prato
We went to places where we felt - like all lovers - that we were the first.We discovered the body of a lover has secrets that never end.We discovered that at times the same secrets reveal different truths.
Tarun J. Tejpal
I've adopted the guideline of Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who says "I wanna know where I'll be when I die - so I never go there.
Tom Brokaw
I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.
Gloria Steinem
Life it too short to deal with crazy people.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.
John dos Passos