Quotes by Journalists - Page 211

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.
Algernon Blackwood
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
Christopher Hitchens
I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say "No". There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.
Vasily Grossman
Even if it's absurd to think you can change things, it's even more absurd to believe that it is foolish and unimportant to try.
Peter C. Newman
As long as our voiced were in harmony, it didn't matter that our accents were at war.
Carsten Jensen
In his failure Nhu had withdrawn so far into himself that in the end his face was a mask that no longer opened onto the real world.
Frances FitzGerald
The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.
Lawrence Wright
On the hot, fragrant afternoon of my graduation from college it seemed that good fortune was not merely latent but unavoidable, folded and in the bag.
Geoffrey Wolff
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, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
Ernest Hemingway
What was it with gay men and art photos of nude male torsos?
David Pratt
Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding.
Vasily Grossman
Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career.Imagine being admitted to hospital because you are too ill to function and being too ashamed to tell anyone, because it is a psychiatric hospital.Imagine telling someone that you have recently been discharged and watching them turn away, in embarrassment or disgust or fear.Comparisons are odious. Stigmatising an illness is more odious still.
Sally Brampton
If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.
Susan Freinkel
It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.
Anna Quindlen
Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?
Peter Heller
If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.
Mark Helprin
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
Elizabeth Drew
Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.
Ada Calhoun
Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.
Louis Bayard
This is when the pill became widely known as The Pill, perhaps the only product in American history so powerful that it needed no name. Women went to their doctors and said they wanted it. They wanted The Pill. Some of them might still have been uncomfortable talking about birth control. Others might have been unsure of its brand name. But The Pill was The Pill because it was the only one that mattered, the one everyone was talking about, the one they needed.
Jonathan Eig
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
Christopher Hitchens
In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.
H.L. Mencken
And just in general, I'm better. Better than I've been since Bram died, and in some ways better than I was even before that. No, Lulu didn't break my hear. But I'm beginning to wonder if in some roundabout way, she fixed it.
Gayle Forman
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Gloria Steinem
I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there!
Buffy Andrews
There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
John dos Passos
If we push on, we begin to feel a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are. It's a powerful feeling, strong enough to have us coming back for more, again and again.
Adharanand Finn
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
Elizabeth Wurtzel
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon.
Ernest Hemingway
...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.
Ada Calhoun
Cancer seems a high price to pay for an innocuous-looking habit. You get into smoking and you are robbed of the last 25 years of your life. Some cocky souls will say, 'Ah yes, but they are the worst 25 years.' Nobody feels like that in a cancer ward. There are no cocky souls in a cancer ward. But there's a lot of pain, not just of the excruciating physical kind that they shoot you full of morphine to smother. There are a lot of tears. All round. It is hard to say goodbye to the people you love. And it's scary. Cancer wards have a way of knocking the cockiness out of you. And for what? Another cigarette?
Tony Parsons
When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.
Mitch Albom
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
Gabriel García Márquez
Leef hard en goed en schoon en wild. Kijk goed, voel beter. Wees niet bang. Kies voor wat u blij maakt, wat het ook moge zijn. Durf proberen wat te lastig lijkt. Leg de lat hoog genoeg. Koester en laat u koesteren. Geef anderen wat ze verdienen, en uzelf minstens ook. Blijf hopen, willen, dromen, wensen.
Griet Op de Beeck
Never confuse movement with action.
Ernest Hemingway
If you are lucky, home is not only a place that you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive.
Kate Bolick
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
Aleksandar Hemon
The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment
Theodore H. White
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
Robert Harris
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Christopher Hitchens
All it takes is common sense to understand that the Rajapaksa administration has vandalised every layer of the country’s resources to get rid of political obstacles while minimising the space available to facilitate the sharing of authentic political dissent. At the same time the opposition appears to be caged.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
Mitch Albom
My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.
Gil Asakawa
Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).
Christopher Hitchens
There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
Ambrose Bierce
Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures--that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people
Heinrich Heine
In walking, we acquire more of less.
Robert Moor
Don't worry, I plan on living a long time.""Why are you making a bucket list, then?""Because if you wait until you're really dying, it's too late.
Gayle Forman
A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
Italo Calvino
One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.
Julia Gregson
We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.
John Howard Griffin
When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?
Nick Joaquín
Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don't have the cognitive skills to win them.
Linda Perlstein
Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.
Richard Rodríguez
Sometimes I felt so alone that I wish there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me.
J.R. Moehringer
In the real world, the tests are all open book.
Jeff Jarvis