Quotes by Journalists - Page 52

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
Joan Didion
In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.
Michael Paterniti
To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.
Sophie Divry
Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.
Tahir Shah
When the vision is clear, the results will appear. Keep your mindset positive as you work your plan, flourish, and always remember why you started.
Germany Kent
She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn't know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job.
Jill Leovy
As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s thatI think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.
Italo Calvino
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.
Christopher Hitchens
How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
The stars have their own language, you know. If you're careful, you can learn it.
Sarah Jio
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will break my soul.
Kathryn Lopez
Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling...
Ernest Hemingway
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
Naomi Klein
When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.
Irin Carmon
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Albert Camus
Curiosity also makes a great student.
Gemma Malley
O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
Walt Whitman
She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long.
Clyde Brion Davis
Pray for victory, plan for disaster.
Robert Ferrigno
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
Tahir Shah
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
Malcolm Gladwell
It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature.
Derek Thompson
Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.
Germany Kent
...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...
John Geddes
Happiness to a dog is what lies on the other side of a door.
Charlton Ogburn
God's time is slow, patient, and kind and welcomes friendship; it is a way of being in the fullness of time that is not determined by productivity, success, or linear movements toward personal goals. It is a way of love, a way of the heart.
John Swinton
For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.
Mei Fong
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know.
Italo Calvino
Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.
Ann Marlowe
ThoughtOf equality- as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chancesand rights as myself- as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.
Walt Whitman
A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.
Jack London
Here every bird and fish knew its course. Every tree had its own place upon this earth. Only man had lost his way.
Margaret Craven
The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
George Monbiot
But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.
Michka Assayas
As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection.
Lewis Spence
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.
Alberto Moravia
Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal.
Sándor Márai
The first thing the therapist asked me was, 'Are you here because you're depressed?' I said, 'Not at all--I'm here because I'm Southern.'" Anne Herndon
Maryln Schwartz
His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.
Michael Finkel
their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
Mark Helprin
I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write and then I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Ernest Hemingway
Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
John Connolly
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
Theodore Dreiser
The future is malleable, and to see it, you just have to listen to history and have a grand enough vision. - Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch - Developmental Genetics
Rachel Swaby
Humans are destructive animals, but they are also wise ones.
Gemma Malley
Racing is an escape from society. From symbols of status, and self-perception. A chance to just be. For everyone to just be, with each other.
Erin Beresini
Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.
Nicholas D. Kristof
The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.
Cristina García
Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.
Frank Herbert
He listens when I talk.
Gwenda Bond
As a woman to be competitive is to be passive.
Marianne Partridge
All professions have some element of theater to them.
David Halberstam
He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare.
Gay Talese
One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.
Andy Rooney
Hardly unaware of his image, Bradlee even cultivated it. He delighted in displaying his street savvy, telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants and captains behind a desk; then rising to greet some visiting dignitary from Le Monde or L'Express in formal, flawless French, complete with a peck on each cheek.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
George Orwell
You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey
Henri Barbusse
Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.
Matt Haig