Quotes by Journalists - Page 70

It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality.
Kelly J. Cogswell
Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.
David Brooks
In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it...
Auberon Waugh
A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.
Howard Jacobson
Maybe the wild ones weren't hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era, the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore?
Christopher McDougall
Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.
Winifred Gallagher
The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.
Hendrik Hertzberg
There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.
Norah Vincent
Connected sex is a spiritual experience….It is spiritual because it’s a release from ego, a merging with the other, a discorporation into the atoms vibrating around us, a connection to the universal energy that moves through all things without judgment or prejudice. tThus, orgasm is the one spiritual practice that unites nearly everyone on the planet, and perhaps that is why there’s so much fear and baggage around it. Because…it is sacred.tAnd every orgasm. Is in itself an act of faith. An attempt to reach out. And just for a moment. Relieve our separateness. Escape from time. And touch eternity.
Neil Strauss
The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It's the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.
Mihail Sebastian
Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.
Michael Moss
Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.
Mitch Albom
No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.
Jojo Moyes
the song of the deadheavy as rain on the wide banana leaveshard as drums
Antonio Cisneros
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Émile Zola
acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.
Mark Helprin
Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three.
Richard Engel
She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite.
Graeme Thomson
But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned his head in the other direction and saw that the shutters, in obedience to some mysterious command, were closing slowly, blocking the passage of light.
Dino Buzzati
The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want.
Jennifer Senior
Still, it seemed to us that the main reason we were hated must be that we always lived by stealing. From the earliest times, rats lived around the edges of human cities and farms, stowed away on men's ships, gnawed holes in their floors and stole their food. Sometimes we were accused of biting human children; I didn't believe that, nor did any of us⎼unless it was some kind of a subnormal rat, bred in the worst of city slums. And that, of course, can happen to people, too.
Robert C. O'Brien
Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.
Bella Pollen
Every woman, hell, every man should be a feminist, that is the only way to render this word obsolete.
Aysha Taryam
There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.
Boris Johnson
Fight and eliminate your evil thoughts for your honour, and own respect to become the best, and the great human, if you are the conscious and sentient person.
Ehsan Sehgal
Man will tell woman he will die for her, but I say, tell woman that you will die for her both physically and interior
Andrew Smith
Sometimes, when I look at my work at the newspaper and squint in just the right way, I can even see it as a microcosm of democracy itself. After all, every staff member participates in the creation of each issue. I solicit their ideas. I value the contributions of women and minorities. Of course, I wasn't democratically elected, but what newspaper chief ever was?
Jennifer Steil
To be just, a law has to be flexible.
Gloria Steinem
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
George Orwell
I just want you to know that I love you with everything I am—a million times a million and to the moon and back.
Laura Miller
I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I write small poems— the kind that fit on a postcard… and still can break your heart
John Geddes
...what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?
Mark Helprin
Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50/50, maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.”Then he paused for a second and said, “Yea, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “ And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”Joy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!
Walter Isaacson
Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.
Mitch Albom
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?
Joan Didion
Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.
Arthur Koestler
That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
George Orwell
Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read?
Nancy Mitford
Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.
Susannah Cahalan
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
Katherine Boo
Now that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, it's hands are clenched, right? Like this?"He made a fist."Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say 'The whole world is mine.'"But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson."What lesson? I asked.He stretched open his empty fingers."We can take nothing with us.
Mitch Albom
Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.
Forrest Carr
I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.
Christopher Hitchens
If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble!
Buffy Andrews
Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.
Jack London
The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.
George Orwell
The problem, really, is that while humanity continues to experience huge leaps in technology, we experience no equivalent leaps in our ethical capacity. In the never-ending arms race between technology and ethics, technology always wins. Researchers who tally the results of this immortal race have a name for it: history.
David J. Morris
She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a mustache.
Mavis Gallant
I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.
Clarice Lispector
Grammar, you're the pickiest noun I know.
Buffy Andrews
No Winter lasts forever no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep and we know it.
Hal Borland
Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.
David Halberstam
I am convinced that the way forward for the human race is to recognize and protect the fundamental right of sovereignty over consciousness, to throw off the chains of our divisive religious heritage, to seek out forms of spirituality (or no spirituality at all if we so prefer) that are truly supportive of liberty and tolerance, to help the human spirit to grow rather than to wither, and to nurture our innate capacity for love and mutual respect. The old ways are broken and bankrupt and new ways are struggling to be born. Each one of us with our own talents, and by our own choices, has a part to play in that process.
Graham Hancock
The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.
Tahir Shah
What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.
Sydney J. Harris
She considered compassion the highest virtue, but that night on Obstetric Ward B, it had had a twin sister whose face was invisible to Carla. The suffering women, however, had recognized it immediately: condemnation.
Erik Valeur
He wasn't mad, he was sad.
Lionel Shriver
To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.
Nicholas Carr