Quotes by Journalists - Page 168

Once you witness an injustice, you are no longer an observer but a participant.” ~ June Callwood.
June Callwood
Hey. Sometimes life is a shit flavored Popsicle.
Carl Hiaasen
The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.
Richard Preston
What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act -- not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of choice is it when you have to choose between becoming a mother and remaining yourself?
Judith Warner
In the aftermath of our errors, our first task is always to establish their scope and nature.
Kathryn Schulz
This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
Mitch Albom
I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.
Michael Lewis
Everyone I've ever met who was worth knowing was a bit different at school. You just need to find your people''Find my people?''Your tribe
Jojo Moyes
...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it.
Jeannette Walls
You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will believe you. This is the great division of the world and always has been. When reason and revelation run together, why, then you have something great, a great age.
Mark Helprin
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
Walt Whitman
Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
Naomi Wolf
...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.
Zoë Heller
When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees; I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I'm not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.
Vasily Grossman
It’s funny… when you’re young you spend your life trying to convince yourself you’re not like your parents. And then, every now and then, you’ll do something a certain way, some mannerism, or you’ll say something. When our car broke down upstate, I remember I hit the wheel and said, ‘I’m not made of money!’ And I caught myself and thought, Gee, Louie, you just sounded like Pop. When you’re young and it happens, it drives you crazy. And then you live long enough, and it makes you smile a little.” He wipes a tear from his eyelashes with the back of his hand. “That’s a nice part of life,” he says.
Kenny Porpora
Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.
Preeti Simran Sethi
The pain we feel in separation is the price we pay for love.
Hatef Mokhtar
[My father] was generous with his affection given to great awkward engulfing hugs and I can remember so clearly the smell of his hugs all starched shirt tobacco Old Spice and Cutty Sark. Sometimes I think I've never been properly hugged since.
Linda Ellerbee
Love is a fever which marriage puts to bed and cures.
Richard J. Needham
I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
Ernest Hemingway
Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
Clarice Lispector
. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.
John Grogan
But now here I am: No money. No place to stay. It should be my worst nightmare. But I don't care. It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.
Gayle Forman
There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
Mavis Gallant
I felt utterly stripped of safety and love. And so, what tormented me most as I shook through August of 1988 wasn’t the nausea and chills but the recurring fear that I’d never have lasting comfort or joy again.
Maia Szalavitz
He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps.
José Saramago
Above all, he liked it that everything was one's own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared
Ian Fleming
In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence.You are just like these dogs.If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . .Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. . .Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.
David McRaney
My kinfolks thought more about character than about culture. They said culture could be acquired but character had to be formed. Character had to be hammered into shape like hot iron on an anvil. It had to be molded in the most exact and unrelenting form.
Ben Robertson
Men and women believed and proclaimed God was firmly on their side – and easy and shallow assertion that reduced God to a sort of house deity.
Gustav Niebuhr
What impressed me most was how hard [Julia Child] worked, how devoted she was to the "rules" of la cuisine française while keeping herself open to creative exploration, and how determined she was to persevere in the face of setbacks. Julia never lost her sense of wonder and inquisitiveness. She was, and is, a great inspiration.
Alex Prud'Homme
Without risk, we are automatons going through our days with no purpose or meaning. We are safer, perhaps, but we are also, ironically, closer to death.
Sarah Strohmeyer
The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
Ellen Goodman
The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance
Chris Hedges
Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.
Helen Zenna Smith
The months passed away. Slowly a great fear came over Viola, a fear that would hardly ever leave her. For every month at the full moon, whether she would or no, she found herself driven to the maze, through its mysterious walks into that strange dancing-room. And when she was there the music began once more, and once more she danced most deliciously for the moon to see. The second time that this happened she had merely thought that it was a recurrence of her own whim, and that the music was but a trick that the imagination had chosen to repeat. The third time frightened her, and she knew that the force that sways the tides had strange power over her. The fear grew as the year fell, for each month the music went on for a longer time - each month some of the pleasure had gone from the dance. On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapor, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black, bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel. She dared not tell anyone, and yet it was with difficulty that she kept her secret. Somehow chance seemed to favor her, and she always found a way to return from her midnight dance to her own room without being observed. Each month the summons seemed to be more imperious and urgent. Once when she was alone on her knees before the lighted altar in the private chapel of the palace she suddenly felt that the words of the familiar Latin prayer had gone from her memory. She rose to her feet, she sobbed bitterly, but the call had come and she could not resist it. She passed out of the chapel and down the palace gardens. How madly she danced that night! ("The Moon Slave")
Barry Pain
Both of them loved the earth and the things that grew in it.
Sandra Dallas
It’s splendid how much at home we feel at Pignol’s. A tacit complicity at every moment prevails among the regulars here. A process of self-selection operates: starving crooks, thirsty whores, witless grasses working for low-grade cops, middle- class types a bit too willing to conform (leaving aside the pound of black-market meat and the camembert without ration tickets) - all feel too ill at ease here. They’ve only got to stay away. Along with anyone else who doesn’t meet the requirements of this establishment: first and foremost, to keep your trap shut. The war? Past history. The Krauts? Don’t know any. Russia? Change at Reaumur. The police? There was a time when they were needed for directing the traffic. At Pignol’s, silence constitutes the most important, most difficult and lengthiest induction ordeal.After that, it’s a matter of imponderables. It works according to the rule of three: the people who don’t get along with the people that I get along with are people I can’t get along with. Syllogisms, of course. Now clear out!
Jacques Yonnet
After Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused “to sit by a traitor.” Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering. It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in fifty years.
Lynne Olson
A grimy ghost hovered above a smiling scarecrow that looked puny next to an oversized bat being watched by a wicked witch who was entangled in the web of an even larger spider that was in danger of being eaten by a bug-eyed owl that peeped out of the faux foliage, much more nostalgic than scary.
Kevin Purdy
A child's death isn't always necessary for a mother to grieve.
Bebe Moore Campbell
She looked around her apartment which seemed to be waiting for something. Lana hated that, when the room was a pregnant pause.
Laura Jacobs
Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.
Jon Meacham
That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.
Slavenka Drakulić
There is adventure in finding compelling stories and exploring complex issues in challenging environments, but there is also a responsibility to tell those stories accurately and objectively.
K. Lee Lerner
Gaming was "one of the only times when you only have to focus on one thing." But even more than that, "It's like an anchor. As long as I know it's there, it's part of me. It's some form of continuity that in my life I desperately need.
Alexandra Robbins
The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
Djuna Barnes
In less than a year, the Bush administration will strut out of office, leaving the country in roughly the same condition a toddler leaves a diaper.
Graydon Carter
So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark.
Jojo Moyes
the secret to happiness is counting your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.
T. Greenwood
...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
Hunter S. Thompson
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
Michael Finkel
God will fight your battles if you just keep still. He is able to carry you through. Trust Him. Keep standing, keep believing and keep hoping.
Germany Kent
As for the errors I make, the only punishment I acknowledge for having made them is my awareness of those errors, and having to live with it: there is, there should be, no heavier penalty on a person's soul, mind and heart.
Joumana Haddad
What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
Burton Rascoe
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Christopher Hitchens
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Frank Herbert
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
Ernest Hemingway