Quotes by Journalists - Page 104

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.
David Brooks
There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.
Walter Isaacson
Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it-- and have it repeated to us-- over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.
Mitch Albom
Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality.
Frank Herbert
The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective.So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot.I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.
Julia Heaberlin
Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.
Rivka Galchen
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
You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective.
Lev Grossman
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
George Orwell
In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
Albert Camus
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success
Ian Fleming
Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.
Ron Suskind
Her son would be incomparably handsome, good and powerful. He would be the expected Messiah; it is fortunate for humanity that all mothers have this pathetic faith, without it mankind would not have the ever-renascent strength to go on living.
Émile Zola
One of the cafés had that brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: 'the best protection against infection is a good bottle of wine', which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease. Every night, towards 2 a.m., quite a number of drunk men, ejected from the cafés , staggered down the streets, vociferating optimism.
Albert Camus
(Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.
Nancy Gibbs & Michael Duffy
Know what an optimist is, Major? A pessimist without much experience.
Nicholas Proffitt
In preaching conservative doctrine, Goldwater's jeremiads seemed to be preaching the end of the old world, while Reagan's pep talks seemed to trumpet the beginning of a new one.
Scott Farris
We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.
Jennifer Senior
The sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
Brent Schlender
Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.
Dan Harris
He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.
John Howard Griffin
Horrle was nodding gravely, humoring him, probably thinking that out of all these two hundred fun-loving people it was just his luck to have run into a doom merchant. McIntyre had committed the sin of pessimism, of course, forgetting, as a Brit, that out here optimism was more than a state of mind; optimism was a philosophy.
Christopher Hudson
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
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
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Ellen Willis
...the making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer...
John Geddes
At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.
Dennis Covington
Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.
Robert Moss
Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.
Leslie Ford
Light a campfire and everyone’s a storyteller
John Geddes
I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you.
Kelly J. Cogswell
I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.
Andrew Smith
How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.
Linda Grant
It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.
Ann Wroe
There is no ‘what if’. Only in stories.
Claire Robertson
Stories were a living thing. They changed to suit the teller or the times.
Sandra Dallas
To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood
Tushar Upreti
Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.
John Connolly
The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold.
Lauren Beukes
In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.
Meghan Daum
Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.
Okey Ndibe
We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.
Rick Bragg
They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:"Ma'am..." or, "Kind gentleman... have you a little story to tell us, please?"And it seldom happened that they did not have one "given" them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the "korrigans" dance by moonlight on the heather.
Gaston Leroux
What I hadn't expected was to be blindsided by a history lesson that betrayed every hard-won experience I'd had as a player and now a coach at the same school I'd attended. . . Whoever was responsible for sending a championship team into virtual obscurity was either a serious egomaniac or just plain mean. It stung.After all, wasn't the story told at today's funeral the stuff of legacies? Of school lore passed on to the next class, and the next, building institutional pride as well as magical identities that made every kid in the state want to play there?
Jo Kadlecek
A man with a good story is practically a king.
José Eduardo Agualusa
And she cries even more, for the way the universe keeps throwing her together with the players in her son's tragedy, like handfuls of dust.
Clara Chow
These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.
John Connolly
The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.
John Connolly
All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.
José Eduardo Agualusa
If you read fairy tales carefully, you’ll notice they are mostly about people who aren’t heroes. They don’t have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.
Amanda Craig
the stories that produced [Trump] were always contested. There were always other stories, ones that insisted that money is not what’s valuable, and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the natural world… while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story
Naomi Klein
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
Tahir Shah
My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.
Tahir Shah
Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Cory Doctorow
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
Joan Didion
Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.
Laura Miller
Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.
John Connolly
But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
Mitch Albom