Quotes by Journalists - Page 240

War is hell and waiting is hell and war is waiting.
Lily Burana
And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.
Brian Moore
MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.
Matt Haig
But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in order to 'improve' or 'redeem' nature; they found God's grace in nature itself.
Michael Grunwald
The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.
K.C. Cole
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Ambrose Bierce
I've had people tell me to get over it. I politely tell them, 'How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?
Jim Sheeler
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...
Anna Quindlen
Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we've hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.
Jonah Lehrer
His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.
Thomas Mullen
It's easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost reelection without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose reelection only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn't, it's unlikely they will.
Peter Beinart
Cooper's tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me until I too was covered by the earth.
Peter Jenkins
This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
You view love and especially women...as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.
Christopher Hitchens
To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth Rendell
It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.
Katherine Anne Porter
Love- the infatuation kind- 'he's so handsome, she's so beautiful'- that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.
Mitch Albom
Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.
William Kennedy
It was a year ago today your daughter went missing.’ Bagg had closed his eyes, feeling the death going on inside.
Cole Alpaugh
The most fundamental problem is not that we don’t have a system to run but those with knowledge are cynically manipulating the system for petty personal desires.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Why did you bother coming here at all?""For my work. That's my profession. Writing about important things that are happening in the world.""I'm curious to know what exactly you wrote about Gulu. What important thing has been happening here in our town?""Do you think what I do is of no significance?"She gestured impatiently. "Others have come here too, asked the children questions and then gone away, and at least it was all cut-and-dried. But you came back. I thought it was going to be different. What did you come back for? ... You barged into our lives, and now you've got cold feet. What are you afraid of? You got too close to us, right?
Jagielski Wojciech
Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.
Joe Bageant
I don't think a tough question is disrespectful.
Helen Thomas
When I voted, my equality tumbled into the box with my ballot; they disappeared together.
Louis Veuillot
I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.
Hunter S. Thompson
Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first.
Simon Dring
There’s a voice that says: "So what?"It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?
David Quammen
It’s unthinkable, now to live as her parents had done, going to work from nine to five and enjoying the benefits of the newly-formed health and education services. What paradise it had seemed! Now, in order to pay their exorbitant mortgages, and ever more exorbitant fuel prices, British adults have to work long hours – the longest, it is said, in Europe… Everyone they know, everyone they see, is just like them, living in houses like these, reading the same papers, seeing the same films and TV programmes and plays, buying from the same shops and sending their children to the same schools; and they think it will go on for ever, either ever-mounting property prices cushioning them. But it can’t.
Amanda Craig
Analysis is about re-parenting yourself and relearning the habits of a lifetime.
Stephen Galloway
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
Albert Camus
...What's more, I live in Berkeley, California. If princesses had infiltrated OUR little retro hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on places where women actually shaved their legs!
Peggy Orenstein
Floating in the void free of gravity I made my way along the side of the ship. I listened to my own breaths. It was so dark and I was so weightless that I had to look for my bubbles to be sure which way was up. I swam backward a little away from the boat and into outer space and waved my arm through the water. Sure enough the phosphorescents appeared trailing my movement like the tail of a shooting star. I let myself tip upside down and floated there watching the gentle snowstorm marveling that a world of such strangeness existed here all the time just under the surface.
Elisabeth Eaves
The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
You have all the time in the world when you know what you are doing.
Robert Ferrigno
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
Edward R. Murrow
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell
Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost toplant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban ForestResearch found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shadedpark in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in theright place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for airconditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use,about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees canalso shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduceheating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategicallyplanted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energycosts. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent foreach mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost ofplanting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay forthe services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Becausetrees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them forgranted.
Jim Robbins
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.
Charles McCabe
There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our government hovers, rippling above us, showering freshly produced national memory spores on the fertile bed of our forgetfulness. Schools of undulating corporate jellyfish pass over, sowing the brands of products and services ... followed by the octopi called media and marketing, issuing milky clouds of sperm to fertilise the seeds with the animating plasma of The Great Dream.
Joe Bageant
literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.
Gabriel García Márquez
Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future..
Charles Mackay
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Gabriel García Márquez
American dream,a spouse,a brace of children,cuddly pets,coffee-table books,rusted skeleton keys,plastic cauliflower bags,business cards of business-card printers,a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day,all echoes and loneliness.
Brian D'Ambrosio
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
Norman Mailer
It was all bad, very bad. And the worst of it was not that they had ceased waiting, but that they had ceased to have faith.
Georgi Vladimov
But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
Ariel Levy
The Republican and Democratic parties both feed out of the same bag provided by the monied system, and where the list frequently differs the same interests are represented.
George Seldes
To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you’re also non-threatening and slightly useless.
Hannah Brooks Olsen
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?
Émile Zola
Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.
Whitaker Chambers
I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.
Lionel Shriver
We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).
John Connolly
The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.
Ernest Hemingway
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that's what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
Mitch Albom
The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.
Anna Quindlen
When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.
Roy Blount Jr.
You cannot run a scociety or cope with it’s problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.
John Leo
...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.
Ted Conover