Quotes by Journalists - Page 32

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

Lev Grossman

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.

José Saramago

That was it. Shogo stopped breathing. The dim yellow light falling from the ceiling of the pilothouse shone on his pale face. He seemed at ease."Shogo!" Shuya yelled. He still had more to say. "You'll see Keiko! You'll be happy with her! You're--"It was too late. Shogo couldn't hear anything anymore. But his face just looked so damned peaceful."Damn it." Shuya's lips trembled along with his words. "Damn it."Holding Shogo's hands, Noriko was crying.Shuya also put his hand on Shogo's thick hand. A thought occured to him. He searched through Shogo's pockets and found the red bird call. He pressed it into Shogo's right hand and closed his hands over it so he could hold it. Shuya then finally burst into tears.

Koushun Takami

Though life is made up of mere bubbles 'Tis better than many aver For while we've a whole lot of troubles The most of them never occur.

Nixon Waterman

Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.

Svetlana Alexievich

The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

Flora Rheta Schreiber

...I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...

John Geddes

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

Peter Freuchen

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives

Mitch Albom

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.

Heinrich Heine

The whole idea of government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

P.J. O'Rourke

you are the mysterious fire at my finger tips

John Geddes

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.

Richard Preston

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

Frank Herbert

Elizabeth was so sweet this afternoon trying to show P.B. his sitting room. He became absorbed in some jungle prints along the passage and would not come. The corners of her mouth went down after the third attempt & putting both hands on his shoulders she said angelically: ‘Bertie do listen to me.’ He kissed her and came at once.

William Shawcross

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

Miguel Syjuco

I've never believed in measuring one's worth by the size of his or her bank account. I prefer to look at distance traveled.

Dan Rather

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

Christopher Hitchens

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Malcolm Gladwell

Feminism is the most revolutionary idea there has ever been. Equality for women demands a change in the human psyche more profound than anything Marx dreamed of. It means valuing parenthood as much as we value banking.

Polly Toynbee

Points of views that are expressed on Twitter don’t intend to offend, but rather defend and open the conversation up to everyone so that no one has to pretend.

Germany Kent

Reach out and help others. If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. Be a vessel, be the change, be the difference, or be the inspiration. Shine your light as an example. The world needs more of that.

Germany Kent

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

George Orwell

A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.

Charles Duhigg

I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Walt Whitman

The thing about lying is it’s like creating your own world, controlling your own little world. A tiny innocent, or as some people call them white lie, can lead eventually to the break-up of a relationship. If the other person in the relationship knows the person has lied, no matter if it was with good intentions, then it’s the beginning of the breakdown of trust. A profile or a picture is being continually formed of the two people in a relationship, and the lies, big and small, add to that profile.

Garry Crystal

For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.

Mark Helprin

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Lev Grossman

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

George F. Will

He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.And when he passed away his insurance was denied,Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.

Ted Gup

He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest.

Ambrose Bierce

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)

Sarah Vowell

Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.

Oliver Burkeman

What irritates me most of all about these morning people is their horribly good temper, as if they have been up for three hours and already conquered France. Particularly since the vast majority of them, in spite of rising so appallingly early, have performed anything but great deeds. In Berlin I have time and again met people who make no secret of the fact that their only reason for stirring at such an ungodly hour of the morning is so that they can leave the office earlier in the afternoon. I have suggested to several of these eight-hour logicians that they ought to start work at ten o'clock at night, thereby allowing them to leave at six in the morning and perhaps even arrive home before it is time to get up. Some even took this for a serious suggestion. In my opinion, only bakers need to work early in the morning.

Timur Vermes

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

Tahir Shah

I see nothing that can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor," he wrote to her. "In the future you will be alone, although at your husband's side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation.

Gabriel García Márquez

I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.

Richard Engel

The thrill of working in this building, with its iconic globe on top, would never fade.

Gwenda Bond

If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

George Orwell

when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?'I decided I'm going to live---or at least try to live---the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.

Mitch Albom

...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...

John Geddes

Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA. How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive. Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.... I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline. The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.

Michael Prager

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

Gloria Steinem

Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.

Hunter S. Thompson

I didn't give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words straight and collect my A.

Gayle Forman

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.

Norman Cousins

I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.

Rick Bragg

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, the ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them every day, at every meal where there's a waiter, in every taxi and on every train they board, in any instance where someone can get to know them just a little bit, just enough to get completely gone. But most men in the end don't quite have the stomach for that much person.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

...hope nourishes while loss empties a person out," he said.... "Lila, my love, my love,...lay down your weapons. Don't punish us because I told myself a different story than the one you told yourself.

Anat Talshir

...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...

John Geddes

You k'n hide de fier but what you guine do wid de smoke?

Joel Chandler Harris

He loved to smile. He avoided anger. He was never haunted by "Why am I here?" He knew why he was here, he said: to give to others, to celebrate God, and to enjoy and honour the world he was put in. His morning prayers began with "Thank you, Lord, for returning my soul to me." When you start that way, the rest of the day is a bonus.

Mitch Albom

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

Ambrose Bierce

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos

George F. Will

If you're not reaching back to help anyone then you're not building a legacy.

Germany Kent

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.

Amin Maalouf

This is why we all fight so hard. Not just for the vote, but for an equal opportunity in the world. A vote is a voice. I think you underestimate yourself, Queenie. This is your fight, same as it is mine.

Sharon Biggs Waller

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H.L. Mencken

After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.

John Connolly

In my meditations, I find that nothing in life counts more than the happiness we can give others, the good that we can do. This is what we must teach our children, to think of others more than they think of themselves, for it is in this way they will find the most noble satisfaction of all. ~ Maurice Drouhin writing to his wife from prison in 1941

Don Kladstrup

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