Quotes by Journalists - Page 166

In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial.
Marya Hornbacher
If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
Albert Camus
Who are you if nobody knows your story?
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.
William T. Vollmann
The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.
Luke Slattery
...I have decided that I shan't sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to work my ass off... and whenever the opportunity arises... dance my ass off. ... As someone very smart once wrote, 'Those who were seen dancing were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music'.
Amy Mowafi
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.
Joan Didion
You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.
Ian Fleming
Your next action could change the world, so make it a good one.
A.J. Jacobs
Sometimes, staying alive solely depends on keeping your head in place and your senses alert
Susana Fortes
He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?
Lev Grossman
Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?
Barbara Ehrenreich
Yes, one can wager war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
Albert Camus
Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.
Calvin Trillin
Do you think maybe your writing isn't going anymore because you're unhappy? Because you're not living the life you could? A life worth writing about? You must know that cliche-write what you know-but what do you know, Bree, when you shut the world out?
Holly Bourne
Most people have to get to a point where they don't have a choice before they'll change something.
Alex Marwood
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
Albert Camus
You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
James Agee
Survival requires a dose of madness—what cynics call “hoping against hope”—just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. “Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us,” observed one Holocaust expert. “Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst.
Mark Matousek
You cut yourself off from all sorts of experience because you tell yourself you re not 'that sort of person
Jojo Moyes
Living and struggling, for others, is a great and dignified life. Whereas, living for oneself exhibits just egocentric and own importance, since mostly falls under it.
Ehsan Sehgal
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
Joan Didion
When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
Clarice Lispector
When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he'd gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, "Is it true you live in a tent?""Yes, it is," John said."Why don't you have a house like everybody else?"John leaned in to meet Magnus' dubious stare. "Because I endeavor to remain flexible.
Mark Adams
And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem: 'My dear and loving cousin.. Your ageless heart as you ,love through time, layer on layer, tender sequoia..' .. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.
Mitch Albom
Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living.
Binyavanga Wainaina
The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.
Richard Lloyd Parry
You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.
Joel Chandler Harris
The idea that property has overcome our personalities is the single reason we'll miss the best part of our lives. It's people, not possessions that make our lives worth living.
Brian Krans
It's more interesting to be out in the world. than to see it reflected in the mirror.
Steve López
A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
The fact that you are even here, alive, on this planet is a mathematical miracle, and you should not spend the time that you have being busy being miserable.
Philip DeFranco
Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
Tom Hodgkinson
We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
Chuck Klosterman
I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.
Gyula Krúdy
Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.
Tom Hodgkinson
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
Albert Camus
When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.
Chuck Klosterman
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
Tom Wolfe
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.
Gloria Steinem
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
George Plimpton
People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing.
Daniel Coyle
...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...
John Geddes
We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.
Frank Herbert
Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through ages, I would consider Muhammad before Jesus Christ.
James Gavin
She had taken many more punches to both body and soul than anyone should ever have to endure. But she had been able to rebel every time.
Stieg Larsson
But you need to make sure that the last thing you remember about today isn't that you fell down, it's that you got back up again. That's what we do when bad things happen to us.
Michael Rowe
It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.
John Connolly
I believe in love. I believe it transforms, transports, and transcends. I believe it fine-tunes goodness, solidifies strength, ripens resolve, eradicates rage, alleviates stress, and elevates empathy.
Lisa Kogan
She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom,and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide them with the security they need in order to face life.
Gabriel García Márquez
True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you're doing.
Neil Strauss
It's not enough to step in front of people's bullets; you have to be bulletproof too. You have to be harder than anything anyone else can throw at you, and sometimes you risk losing yourself just trying to save yourself.
Anthony Breznican
I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.
Charles M. Blow
Writing can be a source of strength-Wang Liang
Xinran
One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.
Christopher Hitchens
The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
Christopher Hitchens
You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Was that his name? I never had a chance to ask. He was too intent upon tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.
John Connolly