Quotes by Journalists - Page 80

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
Dear God, Thank you for waking me up today and for your everlasting love and never ending mercy and for my blessed day ahead.
Germany Kent
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretence invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
Gabriel García Márquez
[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted.
Richard Rhodes
I am digging the grave of love , skeleton not found till now , Just the rotten smell . R v sure it exists ?
Tushar Upreti
Fake it 'till you make it.
Gayle Forman
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Frank Herbert
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.
George Orwell
There is a kind of gospel being proclaimed today which conveniently accommodates itself to the spirit of the age, and makes no demand for godliness.
Duncan Campbell
The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural resistance to coercion. We don't like to be pushed and shoved, even if it's in a direction we might choose to go. In the second place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural sense of the preposterous. Thus, just behind my apartment building in Washington there is an official sign saying, Drug-Free Zone. I think this comic inscription may be done because it's close to a schoolyard. And a few years back, one of our suburbs announced by a municipal ordinance that it was a "nuclear-free zone." I don't wish to break the first law, though if I did wish to do so it would take me, or any other local resident, no more than one phone call and a ten-minute wait. I did, at least for a while, pine to break the "nuclear-free" regulation, on grounds of absurdity alone, but eventually decided that it would be too much trouble.
Christopher Hitchens
The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.
Jan Neruda
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.
Christopher Hitchens
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
Christopher Morley
He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed. ...
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Gloria Steinem
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:"Only God knows how much I loved you.
Gabriel García Márquez
In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.
Aysha Taryam
I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas.
Dan Rather
It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of colour of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon.
J.M. Ledgard
They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.
Lawrence Wright
For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.
Albert Camus
It takes a lot of moola to fool around with national magazines, regardless of their politics. It takes even more if the paper is hell bent on shoving a hot poker up the rear end of the Establishment, as that editorial posture is not conducive to a massive influx of advertising dollars...a lot of people on the left still cherish the idea that Ramparts went under because I bought people drinks.
Warren Hinckle
A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.
Sally Brampton
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)
Michael Pollan
But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.
William T. Vollmann
I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.
Svetlana Alexievich
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
Naomi Wolf
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway
Failure is only postponed success as long as courage "coaches" ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Herbert Kaufman
Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict?
Buffy Andrews
Go and nose out the next piece of shit... as one said in the trade. If nothing else was available, you could run an article on the latest miracle diet. That always worked.
Jonas Jonasson
I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima
Ernest Hemingway
At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16
Christopher Hitchens
Tăcerea coboară-n spiraleRotunde şi-ovale,Ca nişte confeti de-aceeaşi culoare...
Ion Minulescu
New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
Anna Quindlen
Here, in a few words, you’ve said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don’t talk. It’s remarkable. I’ve investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I’m the only person who knows that it’s the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.
Jacques Yonnet
Vice goes a long way tow'rd makin' life bearable. A little vice now an' thin is relished by th' best iv men.
Finley Peter Dunne
Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence with bravery and mercy.
Theodore H. White
He had the desperation, not the courage, to be himself. Once you do that, you can’t go wrong, because you can’t make any mistakes when people love you for being yourself. But for Kurt, it didn’t matter that other people loved him; he simply didn’t love himself enough.
Charles R. Cross
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
Christopher Hitchens
Learning too soon our limitations we never learn our powers.
Mignon McLaughlin
Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flamethrower.
Bruce Feirstein
Flint, Michigan. Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder's mitt. A town where 66.5 percent of the working citizenship are in some way, shape or form linked to the shit-encrusted underbelly of a French buggy racer named Chevrolet and a floppy-eared Scotchman named Buick. A town where 23.5 percent of the population pimp everything from Elvis on velvet to horse tranquilizers to Halo Burgers to NRA bumper stickers. A town where the remaining 10 percent sit back and watch it all go by—sellin’ their blood, rollin’ convenience stores, puffin’ no-brand cigarettes while cursin’ their wives and kids and neighbors and the flies sneakin’ through the screens and the piss-warm quarts of Red White & Blue and the Skylark parked out back with the busted tranny.
Ben Hamper
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
Molly Ivins
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
Gabriel García Márquez
Toronto has no social classes - only the Masseys and the masses.
B. K. Sandwell
In researching this book, I quickly discovered a surprising thing about the 1960s: the decade was not nearly as radical as we've been led to believe. In fact, the upheaval was really confined to a very narrow stratum of society. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the 1960s was a conservative decade.
Jonathan Leaf
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
Gabriel García Márquez
Indeed, the victory by the force of weapons shows just one's tenure and occupancy. Conversely, the real victory breezes only by dialogue and love.
Ehsan Sehgal
Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?
Mitch Albom
The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
This town, this country, this world, is full to the brim with clever people, and just look at it. Never been in such awful shape. Clever people don't give a damn about anybody but themselves. Too busy being clever. The world doesn't need anymore clever people. It needs people with wisdom.
Jon Steele
No one believes what they're told. They believe what they uncover. What they dig up on their own. And the harder it is to find, the more they believe it when they do find it.
Robert Ferrigno
In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.
Eric Weiner
Do what we will, we are alone. The sooner we learn that, the better; and the more we are fit to be alone with ourselves, the more we are respectful to the individuality of others, and therefore the more we are fit to associate with our kind. This was a paradox she would have to learn for ourselves.
Howard Spring