Quotes by Journalists - Page 136

There must always be a secret to be unwrapped at Christmas—that’s the rule
John Geddes
Across the rectory's east lawn, through a blizzard of flying leaves, something long and thin was flapping in the wind. A ragged figure in a white nightgown hanging lifelessly from the trees.
Cash Peters
You can make a text mean anything, especially if it’s old and full of ambiguities.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
We lie to protect our children, and in lying we expose them to the greatest of harms
John Connolly
The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.
Matt Haig
And when the sun sets...then the night magic spreads out above your head; worlds and universes a-borning and a-dying—stars and planets and galaxies. And the bigger the telescope they can make, and the farther into the beyond they are able to penetrate, the greater grows the mystery.
Paul Gallico
Every man will tell you little boys should not play with dolls but ask any mother and they will tell you, every little boy has gone to sleep cuddled into one at one time in there life.
Peter Fryer
At night in the town's countryside, you could just about feel and hear everything, but without using lamps, it was impossible to see anything other than shadows
Peter Fryer
Just sit down and write! Me circa 2009
Dana S. Feldman
Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?
Barbara Ehrenreich
It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again.
Matt Haig
It's a strange feeling, owning a secret. It's like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it.
Fiona Barton
There's a certain sort of a man whose every charm lies in his predictability.
Louise Doughty
It must be every barrister's nightmare, something that finds him or her unprepared.
Louise Doughty
Everything is disproportionate in the middle of the night.
Louise Doughty
I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden".
Ruth Rendell
There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
Mark Helprin
The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.
Maureen Dowd
There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it.
Arnaldur Indriðason
Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell’s. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.
Mark Hodder
We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.
Ruth Rendell
In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.
Ernest Hemingway
Consider this a fair warning.
Stieg Larsson
Nothing but trees.
Robert Liparulo
Indeed. I have often thought that when a man selects one word over another he often reveals far more of himself than he intended.
Mark Hodder
I would be unfair to myself if I said I did not try. I did, even if desultorily. But desire is a curious thing. If it does not exist it does not exist and there is nothing you can do to conjure it up. Worse still, as I discovered, when desire begins to sink, like a capsizing ship it takes down a lot with it. In our case it took down the conversation, the laughter, the sharing, the concern, the dreams and nearly - the most important thing, the most important thing - and nearly the affection too. Soon my sinking desire had taken everything else down with it to the floor of the sea, and only affection remained like the bobbing hand of a drowning man, poised perilously between life and death. More than once she tried to seize the moment and open up the issue. She did it with a hard face and a soft face; she did it when I was idling on the terrace and when I was in the thick of my works; first thing in the morning and last thing at night. We need to talk.Yes.Do you want to talk?Sure.What's happening?I don't know.Is there someone else?No.Is it something I did?Oh no.Then what the hell's happening?I don't know.Is there anything you want to talk to me about?I don't know.What do you mean you don't know?I don't know.What do you mean you don't know?I don't know. That's what I mean - I don't know.Toc toc toc. All the while I tried to save that bobbing hand - of affection - from vanishing. I felt somehow that if it drowned there would not be a single pointer on the wide stormy surface to show me where our great love had once stood. That bobbing hand of affection was a marker, a buoy, holding out the hope that one day we could salvage the sunken ship. If it drowned, our coordinates would be completely lost and we would not know where to even begin looking. Even in my weird state, it was an image of such desolation that it made my heart lurch wildly. *** For a long time, with her immense pride in herself - in us - she did not turn to anyone for help. Not friends, not family. For simply too long she imagined this was a passing phase, but then, as the weeks rolled by, through slow accretion the awful truth began to settle on her. By then she had run through all the plays of a relationship: withdrawal, sulking, anger, seduction, inquisition, affection, threat. Logic, love, lust.Now the epitaph was beginning to creep up on her. Acceptance. 
Tarun J. Tejpal
The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.
Frank Harris
Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it.
John Lanchester
I am a bed of sparks you breathe upon and kindle
John Geddes
I will not exorcise you—I’d miss your fragrance, the soft tread of your step on the stair
John Geddes
you are the mysterious fire at my finger tips
John Geddes
burnt by the sunof your mouth, I’m unable to speak or paint you with words
John Geddes
I think there are lovely sunsets in hell—and that’s where my desire for you is sending me
John Geddes
put out the candles with your fire—I’m on fire
John Geddes
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
George Orwell
Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.
John Connolly
Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.
Hunter S. Thompson
I was still madly in love with her when I left her but the desire had died, and not all the years of sharing and caring and discovering and journeying could keep me from fleeing.
Tarun J. Tejpal
Fizz had a phrase for those manic occasions when you scaled every final peak, fell off the other side and passed out. Mightysatiety. The oblivion of maximum pleasure.
Tarun J. Tejpal
We went to places where we felt - like all lovers - that we were the first.We discovered the body of a lover has secrets that never end.We discovered that at times the same secrets reveal different truths.
Tarun J. Tejpal
Who can ever hold the essence of fire?Who can ever know the alchemy of desire?
Tarun J. Tejpal
Think of it." Now he is speaking to you, no one but you. "It may not matter what we want for science, or what we think is ethical. All we must do is provide the right environment, and let the heart do what it desires. The heart wants to beat.
Stephen Kiernan
He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.
Aleksandar Hemon
Flavor factories churn out chemical desire. We spray, squirt, and inject hundreds of millions of pounds of those chemicals on food every year, and then we find ourselves surprised and alarmed that people keep eating. We have become so talented at soaking our food in fakeness that the leading cause of preventable death - smoking - bears a troubling resemblance to the second leading cause of preventable death - obesity.
Mark Schatzker
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
David Brooks
There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky.
Clarice Lispector
But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.
Fatima Bhutto
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it.
Susan Orlean
...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.
Amin Maalouf
But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?
Italo Calvino
I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.
Geraldine Brooks
There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.
Michka Assayas
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
David Quammen
...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...
Albert Camus
Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.
Miguel Syjuco
What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.
Clarice Lispector
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
Frank Herbert
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Marya Hornbacher