Quotes by Journalists - Page 20

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them good or bad.

Jacob A. Riis

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

Anne Roiphe

How unfortunate is the guy who does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.

Manu Joseph

But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. (4.113)

Gabriel García Márquez

Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.

Ian Fleming

When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.

George Orwell

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

Lionel Shriver

That the military have the power to manipulate personal liberties while cocking a snook at justice and freedom in Balochistan is a fact.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

Christopher Hitchens

...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?...

John Geddes

But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Michka Assayas

...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...

John Geddes

And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.

Brian Moore

You realized you were surrounded by love, that you were held by love, and that you’d had too small an imagination about that word, that thing. Romantic love, absolutely. Our notion of love— it just seems a very unevolved and very unenlightened notion. That it’s this one person who you will meet. Eve Ensler

Krista Tippett

Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.

H.L. Mencken

Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it's a relationship, a business or a hobby.

Neil Strauss

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

H.L. Mencken

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

Jon Ronson

Words are great, but even I can admit they have certain short-comings. No word can ever give justice to a smile from a man who never smiled or to an old woman who gives up her seat on the bus to a soldier who lost his leg. And I’m still convinced there’s no word out there for the feeling you get the first time you ever hit home plate or bury your first dog or muster up enough courage to tell a girl you love her.

Laura Miller

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

Charles M. Blow

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Ernest Hemingway

Jesus tells us: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mk 12:31). How can we love our neighbor if we can’t or won’t love ourselves, at least a little? When we hold ourselves to unrealistic standards, that perfectionist attitude can’t help but trickle down. It becomes harder to have compassion for others if we have no compassion for ourselves.

Mary DeTurris Poust

literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

Gabriel García Márquez

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

Tracy Kidder

Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.

Tony Schwartz

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll

Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.

Caitlin Moran

No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

François Mauriac

She's married. I'm more a friend and occasional lover.

Stieg Larsson

Sometimes rebuffing him was a difficult, but this evening Margo whispered something about the prohibition on sex during the Yom Kippur holiday--as if they were a family of rabbis!--and he gave in and turned on his side. Rejected and repelled, he would fall into his nighttime sleep; in just a few moments she would hear that sound she hated, the heavy breathing that would rise to his nostrils and turn into a saw-like din, and Margo would wonder whether to shake him or let him be. If she awaken him, there was a chance he might start probing all over again; if she let him snore, he would disrupt her thinking, and she would not be able to give herself over to the brilliant idea she had come up with while staring in the mirror.

Anat Talshir

And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!

Émile Zola

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Michael Lewis

He lowered his eyes to his dad's face. There was fear there. Fear. When your dad was frightened, there was something to be frightened about.

Robert Liparulo

There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.

David Wong

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…

Italo Calvino

The reality waves itself an assertion as the rose its fragrance; it doesn't require verifiability of it. Indeed, the weak and ignorant minds need that.

Ehsan Sehgal

I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.

Jojo Moyes

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John KennethGalbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a ‘higher calling’”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, “has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue.

Naomi Wolf

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.

Michael Lewis

This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.

Susan Freinkel

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa

Albert Camus

The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.

Nick Joaquín

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Walt Whitman

Women and foxes being weak are distinguished by superior tact.

Ambrose Bierce

I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.

Pitigrilli

Foolish acts and bold adventures almost always appear, especially in the beginning, to be the absolute same thing.

Leigh Ann Henion

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

Matt Haig

If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.

Charles Portis

But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.

Marya Hornbacher

What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.

Jane Jacobs

...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...

John Geddes

...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...

John Geddes

When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

Glenn Greenwald

I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

Djuna Barnes

Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.

Derek Thompson

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

Joan Didion

The ability to laugh at life is right at the top with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel so that we gain distance and through laughter relief.

Sara Davidson

With God, you are stronger than your struggles and more fierce than your fears. God provides comfort and strength to those who trust in Him. Be encouraged, keep standing, and know that everything's going to be alright.

Germany Kent

There might be false starts and do-overs. You are entitled to experiment before you find your calling.

Jane Pauley

I, a woman, find wearing high heels agreeable only on the very rare occasion that (1) I will be ferried between destinations upon a palanquin or (2) I am going to a cocktail party and, at five feet two, don't want to spend the evening discussing the latest movies with somebody's nipples.

Lauren Collins

Previous 1 … 18 19 20 21 22 … 52 Next