Quotes by Journalists - Page 199

The idea that property has overcome our personalities is the single reason we'll miss the best part of our lives. It's people, not possessions that make our lives worth living.
Brian Krans
...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...
John Geddes
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.
Frank Herbert
Strauss admits to being obsessed by his mother's rejection, and with the resultant rents in self-esteem. The Game echoes with disturbingly abusive comments leveled at his adolescent self, a self he feels was unacceptable. With bravado, he expresses regret that he didn’t rack up more sexual conquests in his teens; in person, he expresses a truer regret that he was intimidated by life itself.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
Thor Benson
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.
Mignon McLaughlin
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler
Sheana Ochoa
The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?
Burkhard Bilger
Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway
Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction?This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.
Lynne McTaggart
But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.
Mark Sutcliffe
It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.
Jeannette Walls
Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
I.F. Stone
Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
David Brooks
We are taught we can redeem them, she said to me once. We are taught it as soon as we can read. We can turn the beast into a prince, if only we love him enough.
Louise Doughty
Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.
Louisa Young
It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.
Ariel Gore
They're fucking crosses. Just stick them in the ground. If there's a heaven they're already there. If not… it doesn't matter if the crosses are nice or not.
Robert Ferrigno
What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.
Michael Lewis
TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE
George Orwell
My mind didn't clear. It had been clear before. Instead it muddled, suddenly ablaze with rioting factions of insecurities and dreams, a cacophonous battleground of conflicting moral codes and dogma. I was, therefore, back to normal.
David Wong
Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.
Robert Winder
Much of the genre pretty much sounds like popular acoustic songs you'd hear on mainstream radio. The only difference here is that the front man, instead of singing "I love her," switches the words to "I love him," referring to Jesus. Which ends up sounding just a tad gay. That irony is apparently lost on this spiritual set.
Benyamin Cohen
The common mistake that bullies make is assuming that because someone is nice that he or she is weak. Those traits have nothing to do with each other. In fact, it takes considerable strength and character to be a good person.
MaryElizabeth Williams
You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.
Howard Jacobson
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
Avi Steinberg
A beast barely able to restrain itself carried a risk to its master.
Robert Ferrigno
One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.
Christopher Hitchens
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Palaozoic time And side by side in the sluggish tide we sprawled in the ooze and slime.
Langdon Smith
A mans life is interesting primarily when he has failed. I well know. For its a sign that he tried to surpass himself.
Georges Clémenceau
Because the purpose of feminism isn’t to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right “types” of women is what’s screwed feminism for so long — this belief that “we” wouldn’t accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with POWERED BY FAIRY DUST! bumper stickers, birds in burkas or birds that like to pretend, in their heads, that they’re married to Zach Braff from Scrubs and that you sometimes have sex in an ambulance while the rest of the cast watch and, latterly, clap. You know what? Feminism will have all of you.What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
Caitlin Moran
Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?
Frank Herbert
If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.
Cameron Conaway
Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
Elinor Burkett
At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.
Kang Chol-Hwan
The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts.
Seth Mnookin
The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.
Rebecca Harding Davis
Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.
Tahir Shah
Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. ... [Dr. Freireich] understood from his own childhood experiences that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.
Malcolm Gladwell
Murderers — serving life sentences — were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection.
Lisa R. Cohen
It's hard to make things right for everyone.""But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped.
Linwood Barclay
I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
Octave Mirbeau
The only constant in our marriage is the edge of the cliff we're hanging on to, killing time until we tire ourselves out and give in to our inevitable collapse.
Elizabeth Flock
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.
H.L. Mencken
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
Michael Lewis
I have always felt that suicide was connected to communication. Not due to a lack of opportunity, but to an impossibility to communicate and be understood. It can be frustrating to try to share something with somebody, something important and real to you, and see in the face of another person that he doesn't care or, worse still, simply doesn't understand you. Of course, it is inevitable that this will happen from time to time, but imagine if it were always that way. Imagine if every time you tried to communicate and connect with another human being you fell short. If you never make any sense to anybody, if you never connect, you hold no value: you are truly alone. There are those who can survive as genuine outsiders, and then there are those who can't.
Alan Emmins
When deciding whether or not to go for your dream, remember that you don't need a bigger net, you just need bigger wings.
Sheri Fink
One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Ambrose Bierce
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
José Saramago
Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.
Chuck Klosterman
There is no sense in the struggle but there is no choice but to struggle.
Ernie Pyle
Goo'-by, ole Bill, by-by. There you go, an' the signal o' distress roun' you, H. B. 'I'm in need of assistance.' Lord, here comes the sharks--look! look! look at um fight! look at um takin' ole Bill! I'm in need of assistance. I sh'd say you were, ole Bill.
Frank Norris
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207
Norman Mailer
The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives -- where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not?
Arthur Koestler
Lost love is still love, Eddie. It just takes a different form, that's all. You can't hold their hand... You can't tousle their hair... But when those senses weaken another one comes to life... Memory... Memory becomes your partner. You hold it... you dance with it... Life has to end, Eddie... Love doesn't.
Mitch Albom
‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.""really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?
John Connolly
I think journalism anywhere should be based on social justice and impartiality, making contributions to society as well as taking responsibility in society. Whether you are capitalist or socialist or Marxist, journalists should have the same professional integrity. --Tan Hongkai
Judy Polumbaum
He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.
David Halberstam
Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.
John Connolly