Quotes by Journalists - Page 81

When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then said: "My son, I have attended to thy story and I know the maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know, then, that she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man cannot fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of misgiving, and she is away!
Ambrose Bierce
If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.
David Brooks
He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
Michael Pollan
You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?
Scaachi Koul
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell
Well, they never know they're ill, do they? You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.
David Wong
I'm a man. Men cook outside. That outdoor grilling is a manly pursuit has long been beyond question. If this wasn't understood, you'd never get grown men to put on those aprons with pictures of dancing weenies on the front, and messages like 'Come 'n' Get It!
William Geist
An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.
Tahir Shah
...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...
John Geddes
...but now, driving past the billboard I realized that losing everything is death. A death that I crave and I don't want anyone to save me
Kate Bolick
We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread."....If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls were expanded.We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.
Dorothy Day
Dear Government... I'm going to have a serious talk with you if I ever find anyone to talk to.
Stieg Larsson
The flower is here, so let's dance here.
Amjad Nasser
Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.
Ron Suskind
In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy.
Fareed Zakaria
Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine: “Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection.
John Seabrook
But people in masks were always assholes. It was a scientific law. Give someone anonymity and all social niceties break down. The Internet had proven that.
Chelsea Cain
Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can't stand a little silence.
Carl Hiaasen
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
Albert Camus
Loving someone always requires you to not love others.
Koushun Takami
Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting
Jennifer Senior
I set free the phantoms of my imagination.
Frigyes Karinthy
He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.
Theodore Dreiser
There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.
Jack London
A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.
Glenn Greenwald
Power is a drug on which the politicians are hooked. They buy it from the voters using the voters' own money.
Richard J. Needham
Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.
Nigel Slater
Love the quest marriage the conquest divorce the inquest.
Helen Rowland
No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.
Michala Wrong
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
Author describes that a failed sea captain, "vacillated miserably between self-recrimination and defensiveness.
Joseph Wheelan
I was the Titanic and the iceberg all at once.
Jeremy Glass
Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
Lauren Beukes
Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?
Will Wiles
How does the Christian who claims a weeping statue of Mary is a miracle explain the milk-drinking statues of the Hindu god Ganesha?How does the Christian who says a healing miracle proves the existence of Jesus feel about millions of claims of divine healings by Muslims and Hindus?
Guy P. Harrison
The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
Andy Rooney
If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.
Nick Joaquín
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
Joan Didion
Humility is the recognition of your limitations, and it is from this understanding, and this understanding alone, that the drive comes to work hard at overcoming them.
John Carlin
Sex isn't good unless it means something. It doesn't necessarily need to mean "love" and it doesn't necessarily need to happen in a relationship, but it does need to mean intimacy and connection...There exists a very fine line between being sexually liberated and being sexually used.
Laura Sessions Stepp
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow
Things that will make you unstoppable;Get the naysayers out of your life,Take charge of your destiny,Be uncommon,Be relentless, andNever look backwards.
Germany Kent
The world does not need white people to civilize others. The real White People's Burden is to civilize ourselves.
Robert Jensen
To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.
George Orwell
That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast a man consumed with earnestness of purpose with confidence in his powers with faith in the worthwhileness of his endeavors.
B.C. Forbes
We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
Chuck Klosterman
What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted.
David Brooks
America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.
Murray Kempton
Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to "impute" - to understand that people do judge a book by its cover - and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it's an iPod Mini, or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. "Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. "I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Walter Isaacson
Bernstein looked like one of those counterculture journalists that Woodward despised. Bernstein thought that Woodward's rapid rise at the Post had less to do with his ability than his Establishment credentials.They had never worked on a story together. Woodward was 29, Bernstein 28.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
The world is not run by thought nor by imagination but by opinion.
Elizabeth Drew
[Stephen] Harper had said he would use all legal means, and what [John] Baird suggested was an option the prome minister was considering. If the governor general had refused his request, he could have replaced her with a more compliant one, making the case to the Queen that the people of Canada were opposed in great numbers to a coalition replacing his government.
Lawrence Martin
Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this - then steer away from here.
Caitlin Moran
Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
Judith Viorst
Sexual rights are not only a basic element of human rights but should have an integral part in moves towards Arab reform ...
Brian Whitaker
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
Gabriel García Márquez
We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.
Drew Magary
So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.
Lev Grossman