Quotes by Journalists - Page 225

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
I know what success means to me – it is when you look back at your life and the memories make you smile. That’s what success is to me
Debalina Haldar
Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.
Michael Pollan
After the period of sex-attraction has passed, women have no power in America.” -Elizabeth Bisland
Matthew Goodman
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
…And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.
Leonardo Sciascia
the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.
Andy Rooney
The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.
Laurence Gonzales
We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin
Christopher Morley
The barbeque is the root of all civilization
Michael Petch
Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.
Octave Mirbeau
In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.
Anna Quindlen
When the middle classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats—their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us—no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in means, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor—that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now—for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. You must never, never forget when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad post code. It's a miracle when someone from a bad post code gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.
Caitlin Moran
If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.
Nick Joaquín
Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.
Richard Preston
burnt by the sunof your mouth, I’m unable to speak or paint you with words
John Geddes
Don't be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it you can make it so.
Belva Davis
Stop thinking. I've stopped some 15 years ago. Otherwise, if you will be thinking you won't want to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy.
Sergei Dovlatov
He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.
Jon Meacham
When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
Michael Pollan
Whenever by an unfortunate occurrence of circumstances an opposition is compelled to support the government the support should be given with a kick and not a caress and should be withdrawn at the first available moment.
Randolph Churchill
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it.
Susan Orlean
The ants are bad" The Bear"the ants?"Tahir"Do not be fooled. They look very small, so harm you don't think of then at all. Then years. Then one day you wake up, and your home has fallen down." Osman.
Tahir Shah
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives
Mitch Albom
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
Clarice Lispector
Why are we embarassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
Mitch Albom
I’d watched the election of Barack Obama with them, in Harlem: the celebration had spilled out onto the streets and erupted into dancing, outdoor champagne-drinking, euphoria. This [the 1/21/17 Women's March on Washington, DC] was different. It was like laughter at a funeral—what else can you do but hold on to who you are and who you love? What can you do but try to stay sane and fight like hell for what life is all about?
Sarah Larson
Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.
Thomas French
I was the one with the open wound, and the river waters turned red when I bathed in them. My sadness is greater than the heavens.
Laura Restrepo
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
Gabriel García Márquez
Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.
George F. Will
Faith is a higher faculty than reason.
Henry Christopher Bailey
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
Albert Camus
I dream in fire but work in clay.
Arthur Machen
I am not particularly interested insaving time I prefer to enjoy it.
Eduardo Galeano
An cinniúnt, is dócha: féach an féileacán úd thall atá ag foluain os cionn mo choinnle. Ní fada go loiscfear a sciatháin mhaiseacha: cá bhfios dúinne nach bhfuil a fhios sin aige, freisin?
Pádraic Ó Conaire
I'm Jewish in the way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.
A.J. Jacobs
It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.
Cameron Conaway
What stays with you longest and deepest? Of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
Walt Whitman
I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read booksand stories by bood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said abouthis field, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
Maureen Dowd
But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.
Morley Safer
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
We are naked, but we think we are not; we are wrong, but think we are correct. We are misled but we think we are properly guided. We think we have leaders but in reality we do not. What we have are tyrants.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time--maybe, hopefully, against all odds, we will get it right.
Leslie T. Chang
We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don't want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one's hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one's hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I'm sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can't. We can't. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.
Keith Gessen
I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say I hate or despise. I have sharp hears but I pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound
Joseph Roth
Rejection. Rejection. You can't handle rejection!
Buffy Andrews
The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.
Laura Lippman
The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.
Frank Harris
How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)
Michael Pollan
Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom. Our apartment building was surrounded by empty lots, which were all that separated us from the ocean. Within a couple of decades, those stretches of undeveloped land – prime coastline real estate –would be built upon, with upscale apartment complexes and million-dollar houses with ocean views. But in 1967, those barren lots were our magnificent private playground. I had a tomboy streak and recruited neighborhood boys onto an ad hoc softball team. Dieter and my mother installed a tetherball pole, which acted as a magnet for kids in the neighborhood. For the first time in years, we were enjoying what felt like a normal, quasi-suburban existence, with us at the center of everything–the popular kids with the endless playground.
Katie Hafner
yes, writing is mostly a dream, but angels visit in dreams
John Geddes
When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.
Glenn Greenwald
At the end of the day, we all live in this world together and to practice bringing peace onto social media is a huge step into bringing peace into our world.
Germany Kent
...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.
Mike Bond
As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing
Glenn Greenwald
Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?
Albert Camus
She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
I want to hear one more of your storiesTangle up in your dreams, give up the fight‘Pour one more glass of that wineAnd I might not go home tonight...
Becky Wicks