Quotes by Journalists - Page 138

With confidence, you have won before you have started.
Marcus Garvey
I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
Aleksandar Hemon
Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.
Émile Gaboriau
Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor....
Émile Gaboriau
At any rate, they were strange fellows, these bohemians. They lounged around doing nothing and told you they were working; they were frightfully miserable and yet would tell you that they were perfectly happy. They had more troubles than others but seemed to bear them better, as if they fed on suffering.
Dezső Kosztolányi
...it was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer...
John Geddes
...everything I treasure is broken - it's of no use to anybody but me...
John Geddes
...love is suffering - that's the happy ending...
John Geddes
...you go back to liberate the captives and sadly realize, some want to remain tied down in the cave...
John Geddes
...the real absurdity is that to love is to suffer, but the reverse isn't always true...
John Geddes
...it's always somebody's fault - I blame you for my helpless love - do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me...
John Geddes
...you can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in...
John Geddes
And you thought: they're used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to stop letting it show.
James Meek
(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.
Beatrix Campbell
The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how to raise awareness so that other people didn’t have to suffer the same, and how to understand, and then challenge, offenders who so love what they do to children that they can and must shut their minds to the feelings of children who have put their trust in them. P4
Beatrix Campbell
Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.
Beatrix Campbell
In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]
Beatrix Campbell
Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement. (And how absurd.) His one concern should be whether self-execution will most expediently relieve his suffering.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.
Meghna Pant
There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.
Vasily Grossman
At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.
Kang Chol-Hwan
suffering breaks us until there’s nothing left but gentleness
John Geddes
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
Aleksandar Hemon
No man can bear a child's cross.
François Mauriac
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
Aleksandar Hemon
A troubled life beats having no life at all
Richard M. Cohen
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
Albert Camus
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
José Saramago
... he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness."Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!
Gabriel García Márquez
Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness.
Lily Koppel
I know positively… that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes… it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.
Albert Camus
The world's a scary place these days. Grandpa,, you've seen worse things, haven't you? Please tell me the world has always been like this.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.
Lawrence Wright
When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.
David Brooks
Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions.
Émile Zola
I have learnt that a good marriage is healing for the soul, something to relish. But a bad marriage is long-suffering, a thing to be endured. The only good thing about marriage is that it’s perishable like human life.
Meghna Pant
Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely.
Sándor Márai
And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always eager to seek health. But in no book I found what I was looking for. Then, shut up in my parents' house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always mindful of the tremendous anxiety of health. But I still have not found what I was looking for.
Giovanni Papini
But it's hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims... and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don't know any of these people. But--how can I put this?--I'm almost... drawn to them.
Mitch Albom
Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.
Frank Herbert
Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?
Clarice Lispector
Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.
Mark Kurlansky
When people are in need, you must be present. When people suffer, you must let them know you’re suffering with them.” “The good side of bad acts?” I say. “I would not say that from horror comes goodness. That would be giving horror too much credit. But goodness prevails in spite of horror.
Mark Matousek
Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.
Robert Kurson
Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages.
José Saramago
None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
Djuna Barnes
The apple was meant to take away the bitter taste, perhaps,” he said.“I imagine that Mr. Turing wasn’t exactly looking for a taste experience,” said Corell.“Man always tries to limit his suffering.
David Lagercrantz
I know much less about why God allows people to suffer than I know that He Himself is a suffering God.
Jonathan Martin
I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.
Octave Mirbeau
I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.
Mike Bond
If one suffers from the pain and the hardship, its friends feel empathy and sadness too. Whereas, its opponents celebrate and enjoy that.
Ehsan Sehgal
It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered.
Georgi Vladimov
On the far horizon waved some flicker of lightMy heart, a city of suffering, awoke in a state of dreamMy eyes, turning restless, still dreaming,the morning, dawning in this vacuous abode of separation.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.
Albert Camus
If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
Italo Calvino
Why d’you make me suffer?"“Because I love you.”Now it was his turn to get angry. “No, no, you don’t love me! People in love want happiness, not pain!”“People in love want only love, even at the cost of pain.”“Then you’re making people suffer on purpose.”“Yes, to see if you love me.”The Baron’s philosophy would not go any further. “Pain is a negative state of the soul.” “Love is all.” “Pain should always be fought against.”“Love refuses nothing.”“Some things I’ll never admit.”“Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.
Italo Calvino
Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.
Christopher McDougall
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
Jack London
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering.
Albert Camus
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
Albert Camus