Quotes by Journalists - Page 192

For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others... well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.
Will Self
Wherever you go, there you are. You would just have different problems. Are the problems you have now so bad that any other problems would be better?
Ada Calhoun
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.
H.L. Mencken
I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can’t hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.
P.J. O'Rourke
Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.
Mark Helprin
The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.
Hunter S. Thompson
Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.
David Kenyon Webster
Its not a matter of giving you a chance. I've watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. You have no idea how happy that has made me. I don't want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don't want you to miss out on the things someone else could give you.
Jojo Moyes
I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.("The Accursed Cordonnier")
Bernard Capes
In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.
George Orwell
The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?
Lev Grossman
I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.
Anna Quindlen
Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.
Frank Herbert
Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.
Michael Pollan
...I don't want what other men see in you- you the you I want is invisible but it is the part of you I really love...
John Geddes
Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...
Michael Finkel
Women are not wrong if they react instinctively – often jealously – against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities.
Naomi Wolf
The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree is its radiant array of limbs and branches, covered with leaves. The crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.
Richard Preston
I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.
Jimmy Breslin
That's like being a hockey player born on January I.
Malcolm Gladwell
Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.
Jeffrey Tayler
They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.
Ernest Hemingway
We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us"Orwell cited Kipling's phrase "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep" (Kipling, Tommy), and further noted that Kipling's "grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." (1942)
George Orwell
Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.
Miguel Syjuco
If it comes, let it come. If it goes, it's ok, let it go. Let things come and go. Stay calm, don't let anything disturb your peace, and carry on.
Germany Kent
I don't know if cats understand what their owners say, but they do have a strong survival instinct.
Manel Loureiro
You can take course after course of so-called theology and never hear the message at the heart of Christianity—the message of Jesus, which is indiscriminate love.
Eileen Egan
It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.
Clarice Lispector
A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
Malcolm Gladwell
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
Ernest Hemingway
Going back to something is harder than you think."I don't suppose I could have broken my mother's heart any more if I tried.
Mitch Albom
(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death."And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral."But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!
Brenda Ueland
Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
Gabriel García Márquez
...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.
Oliver Burkeman
This is a good place," he said."There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.
Ernest Hemingway
When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Jane Jacobs
The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.
Mark Helprin
Stay away to abuse and misemploy knowledge, and neutrality with jealousy since it reflects the lack of sense.
Ehsan Sehgal
However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe it all on accident.
Mitch Albom
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
Ernest Hemingway
OTHER lives may find their happiest moments infiltrated with tragedy, and their proudest touched with comedy. This had almost invariably been true of mine. My proudest hour found me, the newly elected president of the United Nations, perched atop three thick New York City telephone books given me in lieu of a cushion that I might see and be seen by the delegates below the podium.
Carlos P. Romulo
The most powerful sex organ was the brain, you know what that meansPoor Justin!
Sarah Strohmeyer
I've learned ruthless concentration. I can write under any circumstances ... street noises loud talk music you name it.
Sylvia Porter
People are like animals. Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You go to recognize what's in her nature and accept it.
Jeannette Walls
أن تعيش يعني أحياناً أن تنتظر
Sándor Márai
I guess they're called moments because they don't last very long.
Sarra Manning
It was not till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success...the first thrill of creation...the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity...indeed, many soured bachelors would wager that it must be almost as wonderful to see the first tiny crinkled leaves of one's first plant as to see the tiny crinkled face of one's first child.
Beverley Nichols
I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
Ernest Hemingway
There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
Albert Camus
Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!
Émile Zola
Twitter, far from fostering debate and broadening minds, has turned us into a hive of scolds. Angry mobs wait on the sidelines to strike and then bask in the glow of their moral superiority.
Mick Hume
Every man has two counties--his own and America.
Max Lerner
our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another
Gabriel García Márquez
When angels carry you they leave no footprints in the sand.
Maria Dorfner
...I can’t grasp the stars, but I love them – in the same way, I love you...
John Geddes
Heathen n. A beknighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna or it can smooth the edges take away the insecurities let the nice things come out.
Barbara Walters
This is the fast lane, folks...and some of us like it here.
Hunter S. Thompson
Weep not that the world changes- did it keep a stable changeless state it were a cause indeed to weep.
William Cullen Bryant
‎'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.
Charles Finch