Quotes by Journalists - Page 162

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
Italo Calvino
I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
Italo Calvino
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.
Italo Calvino
There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.
Ryszard Kapuściński
If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.
Italo Calvino
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
George Orwell
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
Norman Mailer
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.
Ernest Hemingway
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
Joan Didion
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
Elif Batuman
Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)
Chandler Burr
When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day.When your tale's got little in itCrowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short--a fleeting vapor--Don't you fill the whole blamed paperWith a tale which, at a pinch, Could be cornered in an inch!Boil her down until she simmers,Polish her until she glimmers.
Joel Chandler Harris
Inequality was the price of civilization.
George Orwell
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
Walt Whitman
Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.
F. Sionil Jose'
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.
Lev Grossman
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
Elif Batuman
Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.
Miguel Syjuco
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
Italo Calvino
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H.L. Mencken
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.
F. Sionil Jose'
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
Gabriel García Márquez
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Walt Whitman
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
Christopher Hitchens
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
Walt Whitman
Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed
Clarice Lispector
have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
Walt Whitman
All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)
Gaston Leroux
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
Italo Calvino
I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.
Tony Horwitz
What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.
Gary Taubes
That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.
Peter Heller
Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
Frank Herbert
We are always hungry and never satisfied because we don’t trust and won’t risk. Can we reach a place where we are satisfied with just enough? You are enough. You have enough. Do not worry about tomorrow. God will provide in our lives just as God provides in the Eucharist.
Mary DeTurris Poust
The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change in position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
George Orwell
My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!
Frank Herbert
For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.
Krista Tippett
[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.
Christopher Hitchens
Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.
Eric Weiner
The ribboned gallons that rule us like beliefs rooted in single experiences.
Cameron Conaway
Of all the wars that have taken place wince then, none has endured so long as the conflict between knowledge and belief. For centuries now, knowledge has attempted, unsuccessfully, to supersede belief. But the entire clash stems from a misapprehension of the nature of belief. We can't not believe; and we won't ever know everything. We know this much: knowledge remains an endless advance toward an end point that endlessly recedes.
Adam Leith Gollner
The finest peculiarity of belief is that believers do not recognize themselves as believers.
Adam Leith Gollner
The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science.
Adam Leith Gollner
One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbor, not to test.
Katherine Boo
In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?
Michael Paterniti
Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.
John Gunther
Look. I know what I believe. It's in my soul. But I constantly tell our people: you should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.
Mitch Albom
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.
Howard Jacobson
It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.
Steve Volk
But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you needed a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence.
Émile Zola
Take care,' said Delaura. 'Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.''Saint Thomas said it, and I will be guided by him,' said the Abbess: '"One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth.
Gabriel García Márquez
New Atheism simplicity is the byproduct of collective groupthink, and the internalization of self-congratulatory jingoistic clichés and generalizations. They know because they know, and there's no reasoning with someone who knows."- The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists
CJ Werleman
You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore.’ You essentially find you don’t believe it.
Christopher Hitchens
The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.
Frank Herbert
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
Frank Herbert
Belief, hard work, love - you have those things, you can do anything.
Mitch Albom