Quotes by Journalists - Page 139

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.
Laura Miller
She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.
Laura Miller
Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.
Laura Miller
...the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ...
John Geddes
...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...
John Geddes
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.
George Orwell
Only fools prefer the past!
Frank Herbert
The past gives you no justice. Sentences are passed. But that doesn't mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and rail and say, 'Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.' But you're just going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn't pay. We pay. And we're all free to decide when we've had enough.
Michael Hainey
There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life—the one I feel as though I’ve abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn’t perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch—it’s all perfect. Time won’t let me see it otherwise. They’re all just perfect memories—perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.
Laura Miller
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
Edward Bellamy
I miss my old life
Richard C. Morais
The past isn’t always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds.
Laura Miller
Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date—one that you can’t see until she tells you she’s leaving, and then she’s gone.
Laura Miller
But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it’s been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded—that’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed.
Laura Miller
A part of me will probably always be waitin’ for her. And even when I get to the end of this life and she’s not there, I think I’ll still just wait. It’s the cruel reality of love, I think—that once you find it, it’s yours to carry. And even if you lose it and never find it back again, I think you still just keep on carrying it...and waitin’—long after the curtain closes.
Laura Miller
We’re all livin’ in the past...we’re really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin’. ...that’s how long it takes our brains to comprehend what’s already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I’m not alone. Everyone’s livin’ in the past, to some extent. I’ve just become a prisoner of mine. ... I’ve become a prisoner—willingly. But then I guess you really can’t be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.
Laura Miller
Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.
George Orwell
Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said.
Frank Herbert
And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize… that this is where your life is.
Colm Tóibín
Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.
John Connolly
There are times in one's life when a good book—the right book—feels like a voice speaking in the darkness,reaching out from the past;providing solace when all else seems lost.
Justine Picardie
Where does the past go when it changes?
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.
Italo Calvino
By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.
Amin Maalouf
When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.
Peter Brannen
[The past] has a way of hanging around, demanding we understand it and weave it into ourselves so that we can go on.
Margaret Coel
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
Mitch Albom
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.
Cameron Conaway
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
Joan Didion
The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.
Ben Robertson
Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance
Tatiana de Rosnay
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.
Joan Didion
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
Émile Zola
There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
Geraldine Brooks
The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
Don't be so defensive and afraid to be proven wrong that you miss the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Stop spending so much time trying to prove what you already know to people who don't really matter. It just makes you look insecure and lacking self-confidence.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.
Norman Mailer
The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.
George F. Will
In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I'm a very important person.
David Brooks
When I'd tell my mother about these women around me - and how sometimes I felt that I didn't measure up - she'd chastise me for getting sucked into their nonsense. 'How do you expect to get where you want to go if you're rubbernecking at everyone else along the way? Don't focus on what you wrongly perceive as your shortcomings.
Holly Peterson
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Christopher Hitchens
Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating.
Helen Brown
The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.
Chuck Klosterman
Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
Martha Gellhorn
Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
Christopher Hitchens
You all have your own distinct personal backgrounds. Of course some of you come from rich families, some from poor families. But circumstances beyond your control like that shouldn’t determine who you are. You must all realize what you’re worth on your own.
Koushun Takami
Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
Lev Grossman
I exist as I am, that is enough,If no other in the world be aware I sit content,And if each and all be aware I sit content.One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself.
Walt Whitman
...there is no map of the soul because we make it up as we go...
John Geddes
Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.
Ambrose Bierce
A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals — solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition – provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.
Jeffrey Tayler
You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.
John Connolly
If you're not grateful for what you already have, why should you be blessed with more...
Germany Kent
Time is measured in meaning
Rene Denfeld
Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.
Norman Cousins
That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Barbara Ehrenreich