Quotes by Journalists - Page 201

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475
Norman Cousins
Sweat seems to bleed / like pride from their bones.
Cameron Conaway
In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.
Tahir Shah
I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.
Terry Gross
The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain.
Ernest Hemingway
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.
Nick Tosches
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
Ernest Hemingway
The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.
Michael Lewis
The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.
Chris Ayres
Before you came,things were as they should be:the sky was the dead-end of sight,the road was just a road, wine merely wine.Now everything is like my heart,a color at the edge of blood:the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,and the black when you cover the earthwith the coal of dead fires.And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?The sky is a shirt wet with tears,the road a vein about to break,and the glass of wine a mirror in whichthe sky, the road, the world keep changing.Don’t leave now that you’re here—Stay. So the world may become like itself again:so the sky may be the sky,the road a road,and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.
Richard Brookhiser
Sure, safety is, well, safe, but will it help me achieve the things I really want for my life?
Kayt Sukel
Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity
Amin Maalouf
My growing collection of facts keeps overlapping with my life.
A.J. Jacobs
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure which is-try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
The Boy will not be a failure. Mythili knows.She has seen the generations before.The boy will make it.As his father has said,he does not have the option of failure.He will crack atleast one entrance exam,and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco,or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco.He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children.He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work.And there,in the conference room of his office,he will tell his small team,with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way,'We must think out of the box
Manu Joseph
Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
Norman Cousins
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter
Scars show us where we have been, they do not dictate where we are going.
David Rossi
A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.
Naomi Wolf
He presented justice as a psychological relief...
Jill Leovy
I Believe in Miracles and the Power of the Individual to make a positive difference in the world.
Warren Brown
...that whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.
Gayle Forman
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.
Doug Wilhelm
(regarding the prelude from suite two)... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.
Eric Siblin
He sent Zuckerberg a letter proposing Viacom would pay $1.5 billion to buy the two-year-old company.
David Kirkpatrick
A book is never finished it's abandoned.
Gene Fowler
From "Caleb's Crossing"--This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers."Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me.
Geraldine Brooks
...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...
John Geddes
Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.
Jared Taylor
There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on Earth."Eddie looked confused."People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless."This is the greatest gift God can give you: To understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.
Mitch Albom
In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.
Khushwant Singh
Goods are traded, but services are consumed and produced in the same place. And you cannot export a haircut. But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut do you want? Which barber do you want? All those things can and will be done by a call center far away.
Thomas L. Friedman
Self-esteem isn't everything it's just that there's nothing without it.
Gloria Steinem
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
Albert Camus
He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.
Jack London
Trust is something you have to practice. Someday you're going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people's trust.
Ron Suskind
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.""Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle."Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.""I've heard that story.""From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.
Manu Joseph
Traffic is more of the in between time where we think more about where we are going than where we are at the moment.
Tom Vanderbilt
Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn't even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself. But if you keep waiting for the doors to be opened for you... I think you'll have a hard time finding single happiness, let alone that double portion.
Gayle Forman
Don't loaf and invite inspiration light out after it with a club.
Jack London
Would a just God sentence a morally good individual to hell for never having heard of him? And for that matter, would a just God expel a morally good individual to hell who has heard of Jesus, but simply finds no evidentiary reason to believe? According to any reasonable interpretation of Christianity’s key doctrines, the answer is a simple and firm 'Yes.' This is because, according to Christian dogma, it is impossible to be 'moral' without Jesus Christ; I disagree with this on a fundamental level.
David G. McAfee
How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples… small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep.
Hunter S. Thompson
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
Albert Camus
Marriage should be between a spouse and a spouse, not a gender and a gender.
Hendrik Hertzberg
An aphrodisiac will disappear,delusional, like permanence or wealth - a shimmering, as if love were a ghost -and yet my passion for you seethes and searswithout an end. Late April leaves can’t cravecaress of dew, sunlight’s sweet splash, more thanI pine for your embrace, us turned to one;when harsh reversals scar, the thought of you will salvelike summer wind in autumn; deep red bloodsurging along with mine, staid genes worked hotfrom your electric charms, as all my moodssuccumb to your sweet fire, and perfect wit.Now you are all I live for - loving you -in fleeting world of lies, you are the truth.
Lauren Lipton
Inequality was the price of civilization.
George Orwell
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn—lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain—which allowed a girl so poor she didn’t even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead—Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.A library in the middle of a community is a cross be-tween an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
Caitlin Moran
(T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.
Matt Haig
...Sleepovers and dance parties and those talks we would have until three in the morning that would make us feel lousy the next day because we’d slept like hell but also feel good because the talks were like blood transfusions, moments of realness and hope that were pinpricks of light in the dark fabric of small-town life.
Gayle Forman
He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!...He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!...He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!...But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!...And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road...Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!...That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep.
Gaston Leroux
You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.
Lev Grossman
Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.
Michael Pollan
Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".
Gabriel García Márquez
All of a sudden, in the good-natured child, the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.
Émile Zola
To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
Albert Camus
If a relative has suffered Ovarian or Breast Cancer, get the genetic screening. It saves lives.
Lisa Jey Davis