Quotes by Journalists - Page 33

In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?
Adam Minter
...yes I understand your spells—your sex magic—at least, I know this: all lights dim when you walk in...
John Geddes
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
Gabriel García Márquez
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Albert Camus
Not forever does the bulbul singIn balmy shades of bowers,Not forever lasts the springNor ever blossom the flowers.Not forever reigneth joy,Sets the sun on days of bliss,Friendships not forever last,They know not life, who know not this.
Khushwant Singh
I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the "Believe it or Not" song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the "Should have been somebody eeeeeelse" part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now.But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, "Let's play the fucking Misfits." Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, "Fuck yeah!" And you're feel cool by association."Let's play the fucking Misfits," I said.John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. "Fuck yeah."Told you.
Eric Spitznagel
How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions
Miguel Syjuco
Conservatism -- hard work -- saving one's money -- looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that.
Theodore Dreiser
After riding like a moron all over the place, observes the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.
Manu Joseph
Facebook is the perfect place to try on different identities until she finds one that sticks.
Brooke Hauser
You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary
Frank Herbert
You don't need to know what you're escaping from to become a fugitive.
Bella Pollen
Stop spending so much time trying to prove what you already know to people who don't really matter. It just makes you look insecure and lacking self-confidence.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?
Mitch Albom
I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made fore the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
Ernest Hemingway
Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.
Charles Clover
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
José Saramago
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus
I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sound contribute toward me.
Walt Whitman
I knew I loved you when I kept trying to run away and find reasons why it wouldn’t work
John Geddes
Whether on the scaffold high. Or on the battle-field we die Oh what matter when for Erin dear we fall.
T. D. Sullivan
The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless.
Gemma Malley
We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?
Caitlin Moran
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
George Orwell
Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…
Italo Calvino
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.
Richard Rhodes
Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.
David Sheff
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
One can be a Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim; it may have, somewhat value. However, if one fails, to be a human, all other qualities, become unimportant and collapse since all the religions execute humanity and love first for respect and empathy each other.
Ehsan Sehgal
Doubt is how you find God
Mitch Albom
Logically, when Maestro Gott some years ago, after an especially cruel critic had compared him to "a zombie who causes acute depression to innocent radio listeners", decided to stop performing in protest, the situation was considered so grave that the Minister of Culture himself went to console the deeply insulted star.
Terje B. Englund
In that country, rich or poor, a man was free... So America was a place of which lovers and young people dreamed.
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
George Orwell
When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her.
Peter Heller
If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.
Susan Freinkel
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.
Walter Isaacson
So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
The way a book is read- which is to say,the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
Norman Cousins
To be angry implies you care
Miguel Syjuco
Logic is not a sure enough defense against moral bankruptcy.
Mark Sappenfield
Suddenly Dallington burst into speech. 'Listen, Lenox - I want to apologize...'Lenox waved a dismissive hand. 'You're young,' he said. 'There are many lessons before you, some harder than this one... All too often things are blurry, though, John. It's the way of the world. Humans are blurry creatures,
Charles Finch
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
Clifford D. Simak
...don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ...
John Geddes
You aren't really old until nothing is fun enough to make you forget the weather.
Robert Quillen
[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!
Tom Wolfe
Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.
Jojo Moyes
You're living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much.
Nikki Gemmell
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities the strength the wisdom the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen.
Charlton Ogburn
Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,' Sanchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on 'efficiency' - a word which as been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices.
Dan Hancox
You’re beautiful. You walk wonderfully and if I were here and saw you now for the first time I’d be in love with you. If I saw you for the first time everything would turn over inside of me and I’d ache right through my chest.
Ernest Hemingway
El ser humano ha sido siempre un asesino muy superior al resto de criaturas".
Dmitry Glukhovsky
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling--when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world.
Jojo Moyes
Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.
Jeannette Walls
And then she reminded me: "It's the journey, not the destination, true?""True." I said " A bit hackneyed, but true indeed."She sighed. I smiled.
Susan Spencer-Wendel
War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves....
Lewis H. Lapham
Gene, you wouldn’t know a good story if it was tattooed on the end of your prick.
Marcus Berkmann
What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?
Lev Grossman