Quotes by Journalists - Page 238

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this frequently; not between the inane idealism of the classroom and the stifling reality beyond it, which I must do for survival and self-respect. I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be and it is this commuting at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me.
F. Sionil Jose'
Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.
H.L. Mencken
Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
Dorothy Day
Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
Rebecca Mead
A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed - I well know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself.
Georges Clémenceau
Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.
Matthew Power
Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it’s as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny.
Gayle Forman
You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.
Jeannette Walls
We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.
Carsten Jensen
You hand over control, you start winning.
Jeff Jarvis
A frequent exchange of text messages is not a relationship. It's not even a pen-pal.
Ethlie Ann Vare
I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.
Mark O'Connell
Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current....
Miguel Serrano
I would say that grace is startling,” Jean told me as he began retelling the story of how he wound up as pastor of Lagniappe Presbyterian Church, a growing congregation that meets in a glorified metal hangar in Bay St. Louis. “It's just startling. It isn't supposed to work. This wasn't supposed to work.
Cathleen Falsani
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
Ernest Hemingway
Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why - fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating.
Dave Cullen
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway
Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all — clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.
Charlie Jane Anders
Life is just an endless chain of judgements. . . . The more imperfect our judgement the less perfect our success.
B.C. Forbes
Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place.
Janna Graber
As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?
David Carr
Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.
David Wong
One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them.
John Hockenberry
If a man bites a dog that is news.
John Bogart
Every man even the most blessed needs a little more than average luck to survive this world.
Vance Bourjaily
The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to your nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,Missing me one place, search another,I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Walt Whitman
The distinction between a delusion and a lie is the very difference between a successful saint and a fraud.
Manu Joseph
He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
Ernest Hemingway
A person's value is attached to a variable exponent.
David Bajo
I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.
Robert Lane Greene
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.
Sophie Divry
... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.
Amin Maalouf
Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.
Gabriel García Márquez
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Mencken
He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebearers, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.
James Reston Jr.
You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.
John Connolly
Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.
Stuart Miller
As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
David Brooks
Your words control your life, your progress, your results, even your mental and physical health. You cannot talk like a failure and expect to be successful.
Germany Kent
Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.
Margaret Fuller
I am a man of peace God knows how I love peace but I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.
Louis Kossuth
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.
Masha Gessen
Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.
Simon Kuper
A journey of a thousand miles starts with just ten digits.
Gayle Forman
He was mad and plenty brave.
Ernest Hemingway
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
Jon Ronson
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.
Henry George
The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.
David Brooks
It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.
George Orwell
learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.
Joshua Foer
...you must never partly love or stop half way - because then, you become superficial and cannot be deeply hurt or loved...
John Geddes
A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.
Michael R. LeGault
The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.
Tahir Shah
One must indeed test the strings to this life, bounce the bow, wet the mouthpiece, prepare for the deeper music that follows.
Mitch Albom
I didn’t want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government’s orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter.
Howard W. French
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
George Orwell
In our society, if someone wants to be a hairstylist or a kickboxer or a hunting guide -or a schoolteacher- he or she must be trained and licensed by a state agency. No such requirement is necessary for parenthood. Anyone with a set of reproductive organs is free to create a child, no questions asked, and raise them as they see fit, so long as there are no visible bruises- and then turn that child over to the school system so the teachers can work their magic. Maybe we are asking too much of the schools and too little of our parents and kids?.
Stephen D. Levitt Stephen J. Dubner
How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other,the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again?How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill?
Jojo Moyes