Quotes by Journalists - Page 74

A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?
Sally Brampton
…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…
Italo Calvino
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
Tahir Shah
Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.
Marko Phiri
This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America
Ilya Ilf
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Margaret Fuller
What some call health if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet isn't much better than tedious disease.
George Dennison Prentice
You are responsible for everything you post and everything you post will be a reflection of you. [Social Media]
Germany Kent
[Speaking to 29-year-old ex-guerrilla]'I see it as a process. First, yes, you do negotiate. But if that does not work, then you have to use violence to get what you need. Even if you have to bomb a school.' There was a swagger to that statement, a perverted machismo: only a real man understands the necessity of bombing a school.
Samanth Subramanian
Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths."How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for.
Aditya Chakrabortty
Victor spread his hands and beamed. “There’s a truckload of supplies sitting on a dock in Madera. We got food, medicine, and machines ready to roll. All we need is a pigheaded truck driver with giant cojones and no brains to ram the stuff past the blockade and save the day.” The pilot leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Naturally, I thought of Abel Yeager.
Scott Bell
It’s perfectly understandable, in my opinion, to find good things in the teachings of Jesus Christ or any other figure, mythical or otherwise. But to base your life on the teachings of Jesus as they are portrayed in the Bible and claim that you are not religious is disingenuous.
David G. McAfee
As Spinoza or someone very much like him once said . . .
Judith Viorst
If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.
Paul Watson
Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Ernest Hemingway
Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace.
Winifred Gallagher
The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?
George Orwell
The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
Robert A. Caro
The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.
Tony Parsons
O you youths, Western youths,So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,Pioneers! O pioneers!
Walt Whitman
...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
Chuck Klosterman
She was afraid that it was a moral issue, and that was one of his weaknesses. He was Salander’s friend. She knew her brother. She knew that he was loyal to the point of foolhardiness once he had made someone a friend, even if the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also knew that he could accept any number of idiocies from his friends, but that there was a boundary and it could not be infringed. Where exactly this boundary was seemed to vary from one person to another, but she knew he had broken completely with people who had previously been close friends because they had done something that he regarded as beyond the pale. And he was inflexible. The break was for ever.
Stieg Larsson
Sure I’m alone but I don’t feel lonely. Some people regard loneliness as a disease and to be honest, this is the first time in years I have been totally alone. No girl around to put my hand under her chin in the dead of night or feel her warm breath against my cheek in the morning when I awake. But this is just a temporary loneliness, a mild winter cold. The disease only becomes terminal when you no longer realise you’re alone, when you’ve become used to the silence and look forward to it when you get home at night. When you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be loved and in love and when you've given up on trying, that's when you’re in trouble.
Garry Crystal
Grace has a way of sneaking up on you like that. When you least deserve it.
Cathleen Falsani
I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.
Jack London
In a democracy the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones... basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this "thing.
Lisa Jey Davis
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Ambrose Bierce
Running away is vastly underrated.
Cara Lopez Lee
One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.
Jeannette Walls
Ours was a history of well intentioned beginnings that end with a fight at every turn.
Enver Aysever
How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
David Brooks
But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves
Albert Camus
Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.
Gloria Steinem
7 keys to getting more things done: 1 start 2 dont make excuses3 celebrate small steps4 ignore critics5 be consistent6 be open7 stay positive
Germany Kent
I think our job as parents is to give our kids roots to grow and wings to fly.Deborah Norville
Deborah Norville
Piracy n: commerce without its folly-swaddles - just as God made it.
Ambrose Bierce
Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl's wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house.
Gabriel García Márquez
Happiness is a habit,it’s more than fleeting,more than a disintegrating lozenge.
Brian D'Ambrosio
There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.
Gayle Forman
He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.
Eric Spitznagel
Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14,000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail," Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At that time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.
Charles C. Mann
Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.
Mark O'Connell
Order is a slippery thing: it's in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it's freedom from violence and intrusion.
Chris Hayes
...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...
John Geddes
He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.
John Connolly
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
John Connolly
A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.
Robert Kolker
...sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another...
José Saramago
My fat years were when I was not human shaped. I was a 16-stone triangle, with inverted triangle legs, and no real neck. And that’s because I wasn’t doing human things. I didn’t walk or run or dance or swim or climb up stairs; the food I ate wasn’t the stuff that humans are supposed to eat. No one is supposed to eat a pound of boiled potatoes covered in Vitalite, or a fist-sized lump of cheese on the end of a fork, wielded like a lollipop. I had no connection to or understanding of my body. I was just a brain in a jar. I wasn’t a woman.
Caitlin Moran
suffering breaks us until there’s nothing left but gentleness
John Geddes
If you’re not carefulyou’ll end up believing this is the world
Antonio Cisneros
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Walt Whitman
Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.
Mignon McLaughlin
Gary Robinson died hungry.He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19. Drunk, loud, and obnoxious, he pushed ahead of seven customers on line at a fast-food chicken outlet. The counter girl told him that his behavior was impolite. She calmed him down with sweet talk, and he agreed to step to the end of the line. His turn came just before closing time, just after the fried chicken ran out.He punched the counter girl so hard her ears rang, and a security guard shot him—three times.
Edna Buchanan
I don't know how many years it was before I arrived at a formulated philosophy that the happiest thing to do, always, when visiting an individual or a country, is to admit, by word or manner, how much I'm finding there that my life had lacked hitherto
Clara E. Laughlin
Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.
Naomi Klein
I've been offered proof of God's existence at regular intervals in my life through experiences so profound they've given goose bumps to atheists.
Jennifer Skiff
...good words - that triumphalism of positivity- but life will claw and eat you - chew you over and over - if you carry such a small knife ...
John Geddes