Quotes by Journalists - Page 120

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
Michael Lewis
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Ernest Hemingway
The world needs more love and Twitter just figured out a way to send 'hearts all over the world'.
Germany Kent
Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine -- four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit ... my insurance had already been canceled and my driver's license was hanging by a thread.So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head ... but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz ... not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.
Hunter S. Thompson
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
...when someone is honest and vulnerable, they wring my heart - I want to hug them for being real...
John Geddes
It doesn't matter what you look like on the outside, because anyone who knows you knows what a great guy you are on the inside. You're honest and true.
Jon Steele
Oh honey, have you learned nothing from these plays? Ain't such a line between faking and being.
Gayle Forman
Are you always this honest?""Almost never
Dorothy Koomson
The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
David Halberstam
This is a book about fracture. About the experiences that make up a life. About the pieces of me. Delving into naked emotion is a terrifying proposition. Digging into our souls to look for answers that may not be there is a ledge most of us avoid. And yet, here I am.
Rachel Thompson
Honesty is the great essential. It exalts the individual citizenship, and, without honesty, no man deserves the confidence of the people in private pursuit or in public office.
Warren G. Harding
Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in.
Émile Zola
Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
Chuck Klosterman
Stolen pleasures are always more thrilling than those come by honestly.
Ann Leary
Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.
Richard Brookhiser
Truth is the old way. Truth dates back to the time when your word was your bond, and you didn't need papers in a language you couldn't understand to compel you to act honestly.
Vanora Bennett
Be honest first with yourself before with others since that changes the world.
Ehsan Sehgal
Shamelessness is not the same as honesty.
James Poniewozik
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
Frank Herbert
...I remember the oily smoke of a cigarette suspended in a shaft of sunlight - with you, everything was beautiful...
John Geddes
...I hardly ever see your profile, but have I told you it's beautiful? - like the soft gentle lines of snow...
John Geddes
Time flies with you
Mitch Albom
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
George Orwell
It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.
Jeannette Walls
She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.
Mark Helprin
The night and the streets were ours and the future lay sparkling ahead.And we thought we would know each other forever.
Lorenzo Carcaterra
Here's the beautiful lady with the beer.
Ernest Hemingway
You’re beautiful. You walk wonderfully and if I were here and saw you now for the first time I’d be in love with you. If I saw you for the first time everything would turn over inside of me and I’d ache right through my chest.
Ernest Hemingway
And, in the darkness, David closed his eyes as all that was lost was found again.
John Connolly
You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.
Mitch Albom
She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment? His death, her breath. He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other. If she could go back, she thinks -- She would open her eyes, instead of her heart.
Rachel Thompson
Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity--happiness was human, eternity ordinary.
Albert Camus
The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.
John Lanchester
When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story
Tushar Upreti
She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build
Matt Haig
If we were the best hope the human race had for its salvation, things were more fucked up than I’d thought.
Manel Loureiro
Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.
Michael Finkel
One can be a Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim; it may have, somewhat value. However, if one fails, to be a human, all other qualities, become unimportant and collapse since all the religions execute humanity and love first for respect and empathy each other.
Ehsan Sehgal
Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.
José Saramago
In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.
Joan Didion
Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.
Marcus Garvey
Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times
Amy Molloy
...I recall that day on the beach - the sand so brilliant, the clouds so massive, and the wind punishing your hair...
John Geddes
...spiritual or emotional pain doesn't become a memory so much as a bruise ...
John Geddes
...everyone wants to be excited by something magical and wondrous - to be reminded of how they once saw the world ...
John Geddes
...we went to watch the waves that bitter day and the wind took your red cap and mittens - blew them into the sea...
John Geddes
...strands of your hair and tendrils of the wind spin into nothingness the memories of that day...
John Geddes
...before you, life was desolate - the past hardly worth remembering - and now, each moment a keepsake I can't throw away ...
John Geddes
...every time I look at you autumn leaves come in between - does it matter they're the color of your hair - or they still fall in my memory?...
John Geddes
...when I was a kid, Toronto streets were deserted and quiet on Sundays, except for the sound of church bells I stood on the sidewalk one December listening to the Christmas bells - I've never forgotten that moment...
John Geddes
...we live in the same city but don't see the same things - you see buildings and I see memories...
John Geddes
...everything is gone except traces of you inside me - and the years like the wind are sweeping those away ...
John Geddes
Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?
Joshua Foer
In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Gabriel García Márquez
RedheadAll over the houseStrands of copper hairLike filaments from a cobwebCollect.If you and IWere ever to part— For months, perhaps years,I’d be combing out,Brushing or picking upStrands of significance,Traces of youIn my life
John Geddes
I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth.There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.
Jeffrey Tayler
The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago...
Joan Didion