Quotes by Columnists - Page 7

Why do people put off travel until retirement? What are they saving it for? I understand that people want to be financially secure first, and pay off pension plans, but why consign the most active years of your life to drudgery? Why would you sacrifice today's freedom for a future that will always remain uncertain, no matter how carefully you plan for it? I'm not saying that everyone sitting in an office right this minute should drop everything and take off for Central Europe. I'm saying that if you want to see the world, plan for it and do it as soon as possible. The experience will give you the inspiration and fortitude you need to survive being a grown up.
Jessica Zafra
I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.
Jessica Zafra
Remember the many compartments of the heart, the seed of what is possible. So much of who we are is defined by the places we hold for each other. For it is not our ingenuity that sets us apart, but our capacity for love, the possibility our way will be lit by grace. Our hearts prisms, chiseling out the colors of pure light.
Kare Anderson
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, and don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.
Mary Schmich
The yoke is hard because the teachings of Jesus are radical: enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, extreme generosity. The yoke is easy because it is accessible to all — the studied and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the religious and the nonreligious. Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, applied differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently.
Rachel Held Evans
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
Franklin P. Adams
If the ultimate goal is lasting love, women are going to have to become comfortable with sacrifice and capitulation. Because those are the underpinnings of a long-term marriage – for both sexes.
Suzanne Venker
I'm fairly certain that, at this very minute, the [Mars Polar Lander] is floating somewhere around the Neptune feeling tired and cranky and looking for a Holiday Inn.Of course, you'd have to have a heart of titanium not to feel a twinge of sadness while watching those dejected NASA scientiest waiting by the phone like the class wallflower on prom week.On the other hand, it was kind of fun to watch a bunch of men waiting by the phone and seeing how they feel when someone promises they'll call and then YOU NEVER HEAR FROM HIM AGAIN.
Celia Rivenbark
There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.
Dave Barry
Prune these alleged friends ruthlessly from your life. You need all the positive reinforcement you can get. You need friends who think you're fabulous, an angel in human shape, and a breath of springtime.
Cynthia Heimel
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you Sing Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements. Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children,maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.
Mary Schmich
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.
Maeve Binchy
Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
Dennis Prager
To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive
Maeve Binchy
Quiet the chattering mind promotes directed action. We can't know which interactions will deepen into richer relationships, yet we can keep the faith that our mutuality mindset affirms them. Mutuality most demonstrates our humanity and, in the end, that may be what most matters in our lives.
Kare Anderson
Trust isn’t about having a spotless record and finding someone else who does. It’s about finding someone good-hearted enough not to hurt you on purpose, and knowing you’ll recover and carry on when pain inevitably comes.
Carolyn Hax
...light overcomes darkenss. A tiny match can illuminate the darkest room. As long as there is some light somewhere in the universe, [darkness] can be defeated.
Dave Barry
I have a tendency to want to understand everything people say and everything I hear, both at work and outside, even at a distance, even if it’s one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears or is said precisely so I won’t understand it.
Javier Marías
each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars India has fought against Pakistan or China. They have no idea, for instance, of what many people call the greatest threat to India’s internal security: the Naxal movement. What created this Naxal movement? And why is the movement popular where it is? Our youth doesn’t know.
Sidin Vadukut
Why should each generation be brought up on the selective prejudices of the one before it? I believe that this is exactly the point of history. And not just reading or studying history but also approaching it with a sceptical bent of mind. When each generation approaches received wisdom with scepticism, perhaps it will reassess established notions of right and wrong, love and hate. Perhaps it will finally see mistaken priorities for what they really are. Perhaps it will do something that previous generations steadfastly refused to do.
Sidin Vadukut
Academic pedigree alone is no guarantor of useful knowledge and wisdom.
Robert Samuelson
We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong.
Bill Vaughan
Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best answer but the only one.
Peggy Noonan
As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet … Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God …
John Derbyshire
Progressives' don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.
Kathy Shaidle
The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers.
Charles Murray
For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, "Do you believe in God?" His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks out the and says in a voice like shattered glass, "Only in storms.
Rebecca Sparrow
(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where “my dad’s hermeneutic can beat up your dad’s hermeneutic” served as legit schoolyard banter.)
Rachel Held Evans
We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.
Javier Marías
Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.
Gurcharan Das
I think believing in something is what matters most.Believe in nature or believe in love or believe that bydoing the right thing you can make some differenceto another human being or an entire generation.
Rachel C. Weingarten
There's nothing wrong with self-improvement, as long as you recognize that at some point you're going to have to accept yourself in all your imperfect glory. What's wrong with liking yourself the way you are?
Jessica Zafra
Ultimately, my love saved me, for my love gave me strength. At night, when sleep was sunwilling to rescue me, I gritted my teeth and devoured my fondest memories.
John Shors
Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions!
George W. Crane
Because knowledge is not for showing off. If I do good work, people should notice me.
Chetan Bhagat
Somehow, we’ve managed to create a social, cultural and political environment in which even our youngest citizens have been so deeply indoctrinated to hate. Who else, I wonder, have we indoctrinated them against? Little Muslim kids against Hindus? Little Hindu kids against Muslims? Little Dalits against all Yadavs?
Sidin Vadukut
Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.
Dave Barry
And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new--perhaps something better--into this world...We are each an Eve.
Rachel Held Evans
I believe that feminism has become a political movement that seeks to obtain unlimited rights for woman without corresponding responsibilities via the suppression of feminism.Under my definition, helping oppressed women in other countries falls outside the scope of the movement's interests.
Mike Adams
Feminists often pretend to be angry and offended in order to win debates or, I should say, prevent debates from ever happening. If you can act angry and offended, especially on a college campus, you can shut down the other side using a speech code.
Mike Adams
Does rejecting feminism mean rejecting women's equality? No, because that's not what feminism is about. Rejecting feminism means recognizing that women don't need feminism to make them equal to men because they already are equal--just not the same.
Suzanne Venker
Talk about a group that is REALLY suffering, it's women in America. To be a woman in America is just to live under this sword of wage inequality. Ask her in 20 years from now, "Patricia Arquette, you had the chance to talk to millions of people in over 100 countries. What did you decide to talk about? With women being traded as sex slaves in the tens of thousands under Islamic rule, in Africa and the middle East, and WHAT did you decide to talk about?" Wage inequality in America. You're a moral fool.If in fact women really got 77 cents to the dollar, why would any employer hire men? If I can get the exact same work and save almost 25%, you would have to be an idiot to hire a man! It's all nonsense. It's all a lie.
Dennis Prager
According to the Talmud, loshon hara kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is told. 'Kill' may strike the modern reader as a bit hyperbolic, but when you think of all the friendships lost, careers stunted, and opportunities thwarted as a result of gossip among women, violent language seems appropriate. We cause serious collateral damage to the advancement of our sex each time we perpetuate the stereotype that women can't get along.
Rachel Held Evans
Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.
Javier Marías
When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.
Javier Marías
Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.
Javier Marías
Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
Javier Marías
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.
Franklin P. Adams
In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!
Chetan Bhagat
Those who say that having childlike faith means not asking questions haven't met too many children.
Rachel Held Evans
To receive children’s love and to come home to a child who runs to you with a hug, among the most powerful emotional experiences available.
Dennis Prager
What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.
Marjorie Holmes
If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.
Dave Barry
I really loathe [the bumper sticker] 'Proud Parent of a Terrific Kid!'Why not a bumper sticker for the unlucky parents, something like: 'My Fifteen-Year-Old's in Detox and Not Speaking to Any of Us' or 'My Kid Robbed a 7-Eleven and is in a Center for Youthful Offenders.
Celia Rivenbark
A simple test to ascertain how much you enjoy and derive meaning from your work is to ask yourself whether you would continue doing it if you won the lottery.
Dennis Prager
I wondered then why children played so in the river, but adults ceased to see it with the same eyes. Why couldn't we embrace such simple joys?
John Shors
Women’s imagination – unlike men’s, I would argue – does not always need the erotic equivalent of Semtex to ensure detonation.
India Knight
The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
Heywood Broun
Something is wrong here: sex has been with us since the human race began its existence, yet I would estimate that 90 percent of human beings still suffer enormous inhibitions in this area.
Xaviera Hollander
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
John Derbyshire