Quotes by Journalists - Page 63

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).
Christopher Hitchens
Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last."-The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold--your hard-breathing point--during your endurance runs.
Christopher McDougall
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orc
Walt Whitman
*marissa tries to get her single, working mother's attention by suggesting something outrageous, to which mom replies:*'You're a smart girl. Use your head and avoid any guy who reminds you of your father.
Camille Pagán
Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Marya Hornbacher
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.
Naomi Klein
A finished person is a boring person.
Anna Quindlen
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
The real madness probably is not another thing that the wisdom itself that, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has taken the intelligent resolution to become mad
Heinrich Heine
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
George Orwell
Begin somewhere. You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
Liz Smith
War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.
Lee Sandlin
Pity the human being who is not able to connect faith within himself with the infinite.... He who has faith has ... an inward reservoir of courage hope confidence calmness and assuring trust that all will come out well-even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.
B.C. Forbes
Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. "Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if he were a director sweating each scene of a film. "The PIxar building was Steve's own movie," Lasseter said.
Walter Isaacson
Don't live the same day over and over again and call that a life. Life is about evolving mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.
Germany Kent
No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception.
Nick Joaquín
(Life) it was a little bit nearer than God, but no less powerful and terrible. Yes, it was something, perhaps, that one did not wish to understand because one feared it, something to which one paid tribute lest it should feel offended and seize one, body and soul.
Arthur Holitscher
Canada reminds me of vichyssoise - it's cold half-French and difficult to stir.
Stuart Keate
It is cheap generosity which promises the future in compensation for the present.
J. A. Spender
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Matt Taibbi
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
P.J. O'Rourke
... Play the age as comedy if you want to get away with murder.
James Agee
There's a lot to be said for the fellow who doesn't say it himself.
Maurice Switzer
I'll have you understand the United States has got the best navy in the world.""Well, . . . why, then, do we need a bigger navy?""We've got to have a still bigger navy because we're the richest nation on earth.
Clyde Brion Davis
There seems to be a direct correlation between the spike in suicides by young people and the increase in cyberbullying amongst young people.
Germany Kent
She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing ore than to challenge herself with more complex parts--and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature....Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it.
J. Randy Taraborrelli
Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.
Anthony Lane
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies... Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
George Orwell
Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.
Gayle Forman
Show me someone who never gossips and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people.
Barbara Walters
...E non aspettarti una strada senza ostacoli, senza quel fuoco la tua luce si spegnerebbe. Usa la tempesta per liberarti".
T. Terzani
There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.
Chloe Schama
Why did you shoot him?""You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.
John Connolly
...that's the essence of me - I don't think, I feel - at best, I think-feel...
John Geddes
The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.
Thomas Mullen
Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.
David Brooks
I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Today, spend a little time cultivating relationships offline. Never forget that everybody isn't on social media.
Germany Kent
Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,' he said. 'I think that’s kind of the point of them.
Jojo Moyes
I've always been fascinated by weather.
Shepard Smith
Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.
George Orwell
In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.
Gloria Steinem
But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man's greatest sorrows.
Clarice Lispector
Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
Mitch Albom
Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.
Tom Hodgkinson
...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...
John Geddes
He had left home one day, yesterday, and come home today, and the change was too much for him to bear. And this was why he could not go home all at once.
Robert Laxalt
...the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Because of racism, he can't govern effectively' is not a great argument for re-election.
James Taranto
Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly," when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her - something having to do with who she really was.
Elif Batuman
And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.
Charlie Jane Anders
the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.
Geraldine Brooks
A moment of peace and silence, breathing in and out the frigid air, watching daylight seep into the forest, hearing the first chatter of distant crows, the wind sighing over the snow and through the fir and pine branches and the twittering of chickadees as they flitted in little tribes from tree to tree.
Mike Bond
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Karl Kraus
In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large.The gates of the rich occasionally rattled, remained class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
Katherine Boo
Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our brains are equipped with the facility to produce and process speech, and we are capable of abstract thought. A bee may dance to show other bees the location of a source of food, a green monkey may deliver sophisticated vocal signals, and a sparrow may manage as many as thirteen different types of song, but an animal's system of communication has a limited repertoire; ours, on the other hand, is 'open', and its mechanisms permit a potentially infinite variety of utterances.
Henry Hitchings
I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.
Gloria Steinem
I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man's friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them do so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence, and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.
Tom Bissell
Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.
Laurie Penny
In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.
George Orwell