Quotes by Journalists - Page 189

I’d very much like to ‘conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an outline of the beginning of an answer, however ill-defined or trite it might be . . . But no. I’m here to see, hear, observe - to experience. Let others explain.
Jacques Yonnet
...when the room goes silent, someone has spoken with authority...
John Geddes
[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.
Janet Malcolm
Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.
Piero Gheddo
The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.
David Halberstam
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.
Chuck Klosterman
When we are asked to show our love for God, our desire for him, when he asks us as Jesus asked Peter, 'Lovest thou me?' we have to give proof of it. 'Lovest thou me more than these, more than any human companionship, more than any human love?' It is not filth and ugliness, drugs and drink and perversion he is asking us to prefer him to. He is asking us to prefer him to all beauty and loveliness. To all other love. He is giving us a chance to prove our faith, our hope, our charity. It is as hard and painful as Abraham's ordeal, when he thought he was asked to perform a human sacrifice and immolate his son.
Dorothy Day
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
Ernest Hemingway
She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
Djuna Barnes
And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?
Alice Steinbach
We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.
Arthur Machen
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
Mark Helprin
Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.
Garry Wills
I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
Buffy Andrews
RedheadAll over the houseStrands of copper hairLike filaments from a cobwebCollect.If you and IWere ever to part— For months, perhaps years,I’d be combing out,Brushing or picking upStrands of significance,Traces of youIn my life
John Geddes
Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
Jeannette Walls
I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.
Sarah Liss
Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Richard Brookhiser
We cannot 100 percent know the depth of another person’s heart. We cannot know the whys and whats of his soul.This idea could be sad, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of rendering human beings powerless, it could render them more compassionate. Knowing that the stranger who just bumped you in the hall or that the awkward loner who sits behind you in class each have a story, makes it easier to chose kindness — again, again, and again.
Chelsey Philpot
I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth.There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.
Jeffrey Tayler
Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
Katherine Boo
How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner
The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
Christopher Hitchens
Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.
Lionel Shriver
My books have very few villains pretending to be righteous, but they are filled with good people who have pretended to be villains so well that they believe it themselves. This is how I like to view reality.
Kenneth Everett
Erotic longing is really a longing to merge with something greater than oneself. For every kind of love is a force that holds the promise of taking us beyond the limitations of our individual lives.
Julianne Davidow
Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.
Gabriel García Márquez
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Geraldine Brooks
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace.
Norman Cousins
We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
Mitch Albom
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
George Orwell
If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship.
Juan Gelman
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.
Albert Camus
In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish."It's only fair," he says.
Mitch Albom
She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.
Gabriel García Márquez
Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.
Matt Haig
I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.Sincerely yours, P. Soames
Mark Helprin
But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.
Tahir Shah
And he had a theory about fear. It was all about regret. If you make what you want out of life and don't bullshit yourself about your choices, then there are no regrets, and a man without regret isn't afraid of anything.
Mark Allen Smith
In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933.
William T. Vollmann
Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, "Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned? The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. "Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.
Jon Meacham
To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project.
Guillaume Faye
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
Lewis H. Lapham
...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...
Gary Taubes
Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses....As a Reform MP, [Stephen Harper] .... said of one piece of legislation that 'the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.' The bill he referred to was 21 page long -- or 883 pages shorter than the one he was now putting before Parliament.
Lawrence Martin
There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join.
Meghan Daum
Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
Ambrose Bierce
One of our group said that a lot of people in church spend a lot of time correcting each other these days, but in order to correct another person in love, you really have to know that person. Only then, she told us, can you practice the kind of community that the Didache teaches.
Tony Jones
If you distance yourself from reality and just cling to cliches about democracy find yourself a different job than analyzing politics
Hany Ghoraba
Be true to your word and your work and your friend.
John Boyle O'Reilly
Memory is the thing you forget with.
Alexander Chase
...and of course reconcilliation with England--the country that from the first should have been, given her parallel territorial ambitions, our closest ally--so that some day in the future we can act as one. It remains a mystery to me why that last relationship never worked out. How many more bombs would we have had to drop on their cities before they realized that we were their friends?
Timur Vermes
I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle
John Geddes
Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.
Chuck Klosterman
The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
Christopher Hitchens
Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: "It would kill him if he relaxed.
Robert A. Caro
A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.
Frank Herbert
Push-button motorbike horns, once aroused into action, were like a gaggle of intermittently disgruntled geese caught a in the middle of a very large swarm of fat and lumbering bees: a rumbling engine noise. The bees lurch, barge, and buzz. The geese grumble, natter, and quack. Every day the geese and the bees wake up in the same mood and in the same place.
Graham Holliday
My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away.
Sándor Márai