Quotes by Journalists - Page 39

Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.
Caitlin Moran
...because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.
Chuck Klosterman
The great actors always play themselves.
Scott Farris
Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised. One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating.
Sándor Márai
I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.
Molly Ivins
Thanks, Pepe. You've put an extra night into my life. I would have spent it just sleeping like an ox, but I've lived it instead. I'm grateful.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.
Walt Whitman
Lifting lives, 140 characters at a time.
Germany Kent
I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.
Jon Ronson
Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf.Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure.But th' shelf is th' main thing.
Finley Peter Dunne
Do you know what the greatest test is? Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?
David Halberstam
There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.
Henry Hazlitt
They were like two poor little leaves in a storm which bore death and annihilation not only to the heads of individuals, but to whole towns and entire tribes. What hand could snatch it and save two small, defenseless children?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
What counted was not the facts but the fears.
Max Lerner
Maybe it’s something to do with the movements: the Cat and then the Cow, the twist to the left and then to the right, the reaching up, and then bending to the ground, the constant training of the body to move one way, and then to move in the opposite way. Hatha: sun, moon opposites, dark and light, yin and yang. This must be key in the way yoga shapes the mind and heart, in the way it helps one to understand that every movement has a counter movement, that every action has an opposing action, that the happy parts of life will be met by the sad, and the sad, in turn will be met by the happy.
Kathryn E. Livingston
A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbol means nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not. As I wrote that farewell column to Marley, I realized it was all right there in front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Sometimes it took a dog with bad breath, worse manners, and pure intentions to help us see.
John Grogan
Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom.
Tahir Shah
I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.
Tahir Shah
When I Read the Book"When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life,Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
Walt Whitman
to love means to realize there is a time to let the beloved one go
Tony Parsons
Grandma calls it the Socratic Method. She considers it the highest pedagogical technique. I call it cornering a person. Instead of just telling you what I want you to know, I ambush you with questions. You try to escape, but you can’t. You can run whichever way you like, but in the end you’ll fall right into my trap.
Sophia Nikolaidou
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.
Robert Quillen
It's the small sins that save you. That's how you survive when all around you are getting their heads sawed off.
Robert Ferrigno
I don't subscribe to labels. Unless I'm labeling other people.
Gaby Dunn
Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what’s going on in the lives of other people — what they’re thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at — by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We’re now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people’s lives.
Clive Thompson
The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.
Naomi Wolf
Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.
Susan Orlean
I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!
Gaston Leroux
From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
There is a world of difference between the experienceof 'care' – the wiping of a bottom, the bathing of a body: basicbiological obligations – and the intimacy that makes us wantto live.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: An addict and a non-addict don’t think the same — their brains are wired completely differently. Only an addict can help another addict through recovery.
Greg Prato
Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.
Janet Malcolm
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
Joseph Pulitzer
If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment
Joe Queenan
The American political system is like fast food--mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things...and everybody wants some.
P.J. O'Rourke
The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Aatish Taseer
We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in.
Caitlin Moran
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
Albert Camus
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.
Hunter S. Thompson
When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact they they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.
Andrew Smith
If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.
Chuck Klosterman
The Lord is my shepherdI shall not want him for longHe maketh me to lie down in green pasturesand there are no green pasturesHe leadeth me beside still watersand still waters run deep
Ernest Hemingway
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
Ernest Hemingway
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
We often take for granted those familiar faces and places, the repetitive nature of something once new, excitement wanes. To capture that early moment and hold onto it for all our days, true bliss. Looking at the old in in a different way, making it new once again.
Jonathan P. Lamas
Republicans have succeeded with a social agenda that gets people to vote against their own interests while the Democrats are so elitist that they can't tap into the anger that's real.
Peter Applebome
To call you my critic is to call you my friend.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,
David Halberstam
I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.
Ernest Hemingway
Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.
Laurence Gonzales
War hath no fury like a noncombatant.
C.E. Montague
You don't have to be fast. But you'd better be fearless.
Christopher McDougall
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
Russell Baker
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
Karl Kraus
In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life. How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else.
Decca Aitkenhead
What is grace? I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella.
Tom Junod
The bicycle saves my life every day. If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping down bird-like down a long hill, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it's all about the bike.
Robert Penn
In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.
Meghan Daum
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
Gloria Steinem