Quotes by Journalists - Page 229

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
Jack London
Marriage is never static. There are peaks and troughs, cycles. It is easy to forget that this shifting landscape is really only ever a reflection of the self. Our capacity for attachment determines the kind of mate we attract, and it is through this mate that we are forever transformed – marriage as alchemy, but also as a mirror.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.
Mitch Albom
Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
Gabriel García Márquez
The reality is that many of us in these parts are not enamored of Paris." The Commandant gulped down his coffee. "I worked there as a young officer in the CRS, the riot squad. I speak from personal experience. Paris is bizarre. Paris is a museum surrounded by a jungle.
Sebastian Rotella
This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can't chew your way out of.
Lauren Beukes
He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor
Gavin Weightman
Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state.
Katherine Stewart
In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.
Janet Flanner
Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.
Mike Royko
What's pretty important, and least was for me, (related an exceptionally good pinch-hitter on the pressures involved with failing with so much at stake) you can't be afraid to enjoy the moment.
Tim Wendel
The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.
Jennifer Senior
At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.
Susan Faludi
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Albert Camus
Memory has always been social. Now we’re using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.
Clive Thompson
There's a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.It is really that simple.And that hard.
John Connolly
Love and honesty don’t mix.
Miguel Syjuco
Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
Ian Leslie
In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of WH Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality, and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the coloured peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals—and managed, in a transparent and unique way, to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry (though he never did get over his aversion to 'pansies').
Christopher Hitchens
The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.
Amin Maalouf
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
Albert Camus
Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to do more of what's rewarding, even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn't. Where optimal experience is concerned, he says, "'I just don't have the time' often means 'I just don't have the self-discipline.
Winifred Gallagher
When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you.
Stieg Larsson
Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.
F. Sionil Jose'
He only profits from praise who values criticism.
Heinrich Heine
In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.
Mark Kurlansky
Reality wasn't as important as people made it out to be; to Jude it was simply the physical state in which he found himself, an environment he had limited control over.
Gemma Malley
... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...
John Geddes
Ninth Floorshe ran across the parquet slipped the flokati matcrashed the windownoshe stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise nightspread hernoshe tilted dived swanning spinningtip-toed ink air broke fingers firstnoshe climbed the small gap the window gavehung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breathfell ligament torn and sorrynoshe wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputteringleaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jacknothis is how it was:drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with griefroared the ungiving window frames which gaveshe spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voicedstreet lights crashed on herno.She did nothing.
Karin Schimke
If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus - that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.
Ian Fleming
Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.
Paul Gallico
A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer
John Connolly
War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
Mitch Albom
His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
Colm Tóibín
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother.
Richard Wagamese
If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.
Andrew Wilson
Why wasn't I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she's tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn't nicer.
Gayle Forman
When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.
Charles Finch
Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront.
David Talbot
I don’t claim to know an over-arching ‘Meaning of Life,’ but I do operate under the understanding that life should not be lived under the pretense that it is simply a test propagated by an invisible, intangible, Creator-God. And it should not be spent identifying with religious traditions and organized groups that, historically, have been at the root of a tremendous amount of oppression and violence.
David G. McAfee
It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.
Cristina García
I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.
Mitch Albom
It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born and I can’t quite manage it.
Clarice Lispector
A pair of workman’s brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil had there clutched for the Cockney’s soul and missed the shadow for the substance.
Jack London
It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.
Albert Camus
You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.
Mitch Albom
The jealousy holds neither the colours and nor the places. It is voiceless and timeless a time bomb within you to blow up only you, not others.
Ehsan Sehgal
the harsh truth of every relationship, even between those who love each other, like fathers and sons and daughters, or husbands and wives, is that the love is always unequal.
Karl Taro Greenfeld
History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.
Thomas B. Costain
Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.
William Langewiesche
If you aren’t paranoid before you arrive in this city, give it a few weeks and you will soon notice it creeping in, dripping into your subconscious like a leaky tap. The trick is not to give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about you, and if you are in the right frame of mind this can be an easy trick to perform but if not you’ll soon notice that for a city full of people who do a great Stevie Wonder impersonation when it comes to the homeless and beggars and casual violence towards others, wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a cheap suit brings out a sneering, hateful attitude that can have weaker minded individuals locked in their houses for weeks before harassing their doctors for prescriptions of Prozac and Beta blockers just to make it out the front door.
Garry Crystal
We were both holding on to this thing, this monster between us. And now that I saw it, I could almost feel it hovering there, tangible. It was wrapping its stickiness around our throats - and we were helping it. We were grabbing on to it tightly, believing it was part of us. But it wasn't. It was a thing we'd each created. It was a bad wave we'd caught and it had closed out and was holding us down. All we needed to do was let it pass. All we needed to do was stop grabbing at it.
Jaimal Yogis
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
Matt Taibbi
But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you needed a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence.
Émile Zola
People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning man until they learned whether he fell in through his own fault or not.
Sydney J. Harris
Gimme: An agreement between two losers who can't putt.
Jim Bishop
I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.
Lev Grossman
Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.
Clarice Lispector
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for
Christopher Hitchens