Quotes by Journalists - Page 176

You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.
Jennifer Senior
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is.
Carsten Jensen
The newly minted maternal heart, it completely melted into mush, the oxytocin I know now, had kicked in, and how. I would fight tigers barehanded, climb down cliffs, throw myself in the path of a speeding car, and even do calculus again if I needed to, for this child.
Kiran Manral
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.
Gabriel García Márquez
...indeed, with the Radletts, you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, "Fancy?" I think they hardly knew why, themselves.
Nancy Mitford
I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.
Johann Hari
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
George Orwell
People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...
Jeannette Walls
Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
Jeannette Walls
When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the incentives would've been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong.
Cokie Roberts
What a difference it makes to come home to a child!
Margaret Fuller
No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.
Jeannette Walls
As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.
Jane Jacobs
their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
Mark Helprin
It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.
Jeannette Walls
Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H
Lionel Shriver
Children, brought up naturally and in freedom, not only have imagination, but live in a world of imagination more real to them than our reality. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.
John Connolly
Better to have a messy home and happy children than a perfect yard and unhappy children
Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.
Christopher Morley
But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
Caitlin Moran
We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.
Tom Bissell
The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.
Frank Herbert
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.
Walt Whitman
The bigger the victory, the bigger the battle. Still, be the light and a change agent for healing, restoration and transformation.
Germany Kent
Somewhere, somebody is looking for someone exactly like you.
Germany Kent
The toughest bullshit to cut through, is one's own.
Joseph L. Galloway
Hold on to anything you find that's good and workable for you. Drop anything negative where you find it.
Germany Kent
Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.
Gabriel García Márquez
More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes -- or napping, or shopping, or answering emails -- to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one -- and nothing -- provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.
Jennifer Senior
The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Émile Zola
It was not till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success...the first thrill of creation...the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity...indeed, many soured bachelors would wager that it must be almost as wonderful to see the first tiny crinkled leaves of one's first plant as to see the tiny crinkled face of one's first child.
Beverley Nichols
Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy and the make the most of where you are.
Germany Kent
To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.
Rebecca West
To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!
Walt Whitman
there can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving r=the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy
Michael McCarthy
This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,' she said. 'Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.
Lev Grossman
Pour yourself completely into you and what brings you joy and moves you toward your goals. No one deserves your beautiful love and attention more than you!
Sheri Fink
joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms
Mark Matousek
... I hadn't been paying attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.
Jeanette Walls
...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.
James Agee
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed.
Albert Camus
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
George Orwell
Good is not the opposite of evil, joy is the opposite of evil.
Michael Ventura
Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.
Ernest Hemingway
I won't stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey're too agreeable,it's a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.
Norman Mailer
At night all cats are grey.
George Orwell
For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.
Ian Fleming
He didn't say anything and I thought I'd shocked him, because I tend to do that. Not just with Michael but with pretty much anyone who can't deal with being honest and admitting that you have wants and needs and desires and all those other fun things.
Sarra Manning
...Her boyfriend gives her a Mercedes, [her friends] say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But her boyfriend gives her a diamond, they say, 'Oh, he's serious.' It's not just the gift of love-it's the gift of commitment. She's not jumping up and down because she got a diamond ring but because she got a guy! There are those who say you don't need diamonds. I say they're right. Just like you don't need sex.
Tom Zoellner
We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.
Russell Baker
I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
Camille Desmoulins
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
Chris Hedges
A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap.
Jim Tully
Whoever believes physical size and tests of speed or strength have anything to do with a soccer player's prowess is sorely mistaken. Just as mistaken as those who believe that IQ tests have anything to do with talent or that there is a relationship between penis size and sexual pleasure. Good soccer players need not to be titans sculpted by Michelangelo. In soccer, ability is much more important than shape, and in many cases skill is the art of turning limitations into virtues.
Eduardo Galeano
I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren’t drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.
James M. Cain