Quotes by Journalists - Page 76

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell
Hospitality, as with all the mountain tribes, was - and is still - a most sacred duty; and the man who would slay a chance-met traveller without pity or remorse for the sake of trifling gain, would lay down his life for the very same individual were he to cross his threshold as even an unbidden guest.
John F. Baddeley
How we prepare our food, how we consume our food really makes a difference in how our food satisfies us and shapes the role we give food in our lives. Is it something we stuff in to satisfy an urge or something we savor to feed us physically and sustain us spiritually?
Mary DeTurris Poust
Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
Hunter S. Thompson
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
Ernest Hemingway
I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
Winifred Holtby
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?.. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.
Mitch Albom
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
Christopher Kremmer
...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.
Muhammad Asad
Loneliness teaches and shows you the real and unreal and such things that one can never understand and even imagine living with others.
Ehsan Sehgal
Everything we're doing is freakin' iffy. That's what makes it so much fun.
John Sandford
In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiring—if they are no more than butchers and bakers. By degrees one must account for this and that fact, and it was so here. .
Theodore Dreiser
It was his eyes, so challenging and with a piercing look about them. They were eyes that trusted in nothing and they made her uncomfortable around him, self-conscious.
Gemma Malley
Nations like individuals live and die but civilization cannot die.
Guiseppe Mazzini
Summer days, and the flat water meadows and the blue hills in the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I’ll tell you about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn’tgive a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things - that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.
George Orwell
Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.
David Brooks
To die hating them, that was freedom
George Orwell
Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.
Steve López
I'll be your mess, you be mineThat was the deal that we had signed
Gayle Forman
I don't really care. I shouldn't have to care. I shouldn't have to work this hard. I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.
Gayle Forman
They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect French, and then turned back to Woodward. '...our cocks are on the chopping block now and I just want to know a little bit more about this.
Carl Bernstein
Knowing God is like listening to beautiful music. His words have power. He lifts me up & soothes my soul. He makes me dance. He gives me joy.
Germany Kent
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
Graham Hancock
Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.
Okey Ndibe
Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.
Holly Bourne
No man stops caring as long as he breathes. As long as he has a mind and memory, he will care. This is what separates us from the animals. We have feelings.
F. Sionil Jose'
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
Ernest Hemingway
...you betrayed me, but after all those years I discover, my tears have wiped the slate clean...
John Geddes
Commendation n: the tribute that we pay to achievements that resemble but do not equal our own.
Ambrose Bierce
Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.
Tim Butcher
It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!
Cory Doctorow
You will have to pay for your choices much more than you realize.
Fatima Bhutto
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned but give him a little metal a few chemicals some wire and 20 or 30 billion dollars and vroom! There he is up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
Russell Baker
That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.
Gabriel García Márquez
Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. This disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.
Richard Louv
That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.
Sam Tanenhaus
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
I follow Jesus not because I don't have any doubts. I follow Jesus because in my doubt, He has always been tender with me.
Jonathan Martin
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
Murray Kempton
Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
Rebecca West
One never sleepwalks through grizzlyland, dreaming of other places to be.
William Stolzenburg
People are like a pack of dogs sometimes. All right one by one, but together... together they do awful things they don't mean to do.
Monica Furlong
He didn't say anything and I thought I'd shocked him, because I tend to do that. Not just with Michael but with pretty much anyone who can't deal with being honest and admitting that you have wants and needs and desires and all those other fun things.
Sarra Manning
She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else
Lev Grossman
Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
Virginia Heffernan
The sight of somebody meditating needs to become commonplace.
Neil Hayes
We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. […] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.
Laurie Penny
My color is my joy and not my burden...
Bebe Moore Campbell
God has already equipped you with the skills you need to achieve your dreams. If you just try, work hard, take control of your destiny, remain true to yourself and believe it is possible, you will have unlimited power to achieve the impossible.
Germany Kent
There is a wager that we must all make; for the small stake of some rewarding mental training, we can attain lasting contentment and contribute to a positive outcome for our planet.
Neil Hayes
I don't think it's really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
The hunter does not seek dead game.
Frank Herbert
When the heroes go off the stage the clowns come on.
Heinrich Heine
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.
Frank Delaney
Why grace? Because some days, it's the only thing we have in common. Because it's the one thing I'm certain is real. Because it's the reason I'm here. Because it's the oxygen of religious life, or so says a musician friend of mine, who tells me, “Without it, religion will surely suffocate you.” Because so many of us are gasping for air and grasping for God, but fleeing from a kind of religious experience that has little to do with anything sacred or gracious.
Cathleen Falsani
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident a tight girdle a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
Judith Viorst
Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.
Laurie Penny
Biography is higher gossip.
Robert Winder
Scary discovery of the day: Most people who RT @yokoono's tweets do so without irony.
James Taranto
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen