Quotes by Journalists - Page 180

The French have a term for this brazenness: je m’en foutisme, the brave art of not giving a damn.
Mark Matousek
You go on with your life, because life goes on,” says Isabel. “You see this in anyone who has survived a traumatic situation. My own daughter died, for example.” Her only daughter, Paula Frias, died of porphyria in 1992 at the age of twenty-seven. “At first you think you can’t live with this,” says the author, who just turned sixty-five. “It’s just too much. Then life begins to take over. One morning you wake up and you want to eat chocolate. Or walk in the woods. Or open a bottle of wine. You get back up on your feet.” “When you can, right?” “You have no choice!” Isabel insists. “You cannot let the bullies keep you on the floor! I have been on my knees a thousand times, and I always get up.
Mark Matousek
If life didn't end,' he said, 'there would be no need for me. To choose love in the face if death is the ultimate act of courage. I am the joy, but you are the meaning. Together, we make humanity more that it otherwise might have been.
Martha Brockenbrough
Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.
William Kennedy
The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.
Walter Lippmann
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.
Julian Assange
...he possessed for attractive form of courage: bravery of a nervous man. After all, any rash fool can be a hero if he sets no value on his life or hasn't the wit to appreciate the danger. But to understand the risks, perhaps even to flinch at first, but then summon the strength to face them down--that is my opinion is the most commendable for of value...
Robert Harris
The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.
Charles M. Blow
It wasn't who a person believed himself to be or what he pretended he would do in a given situation. It was what he did when he got there that defined him.
Robert Kurson
Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.
Louisa Young
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.
Lev Grossman
The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.
John Connolly
You can't be afraid of stepping on toes if you want to go dancing.
Lew Freedman
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Ernest Hemingway
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly break his legs, she wasn't sure which.
Stieg Larsson
Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm.
Tom Vater
This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, musn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of seawater.
Martyn Bedford
Preserve your own mystery. We live in an age of social media and what seems like extreme sharing of personal details. I would beg to differ that these revelations are not honest truths but more self-branding. Whatever the case, save a little bit, or a lot, for yourself. If you run around naked all the time, when the storm hits, you’ll have no raincoat.
Susan Kirschbaum
All new news is old news happening to new people
Malcolm Muggeridge
VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.
Lawrence Wright
Dying is easy. Living is hard
Gayle Forman
when a man", continued Raoul,"adopts such romantic methods to entice a young girl's affections. ..""The man must be either a villain, or the girl a fool: is that it?
Gaston Leroux
Time can be strange sometimes. It can leave imprints in particular places, leaving ghosts of memories trapped.
Holly Bourne
Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.
Jeanette Walls
I've never believed in measuring one's worth by the size of his or her bank account. I prefer to look at distance traveled.
Dan Rather
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
You wouldn’t believethe sun had ever shone on this heart.
Antonio Cisneros
What air is there left to breathe
Antonio Cisneros
the song of the deadheavy as rain on the wide banana leaveshard as drums
Antonio Cisneros
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”But I wonder if there’s no breaking then there’s no healing, and if there’s no healing then there’s no learning. And if there’s no learning then there’s no struggle. But the struggle is a part of life. So must all hearts be broken?
Albert Camus
And I said, 'Do I have leprosy?' And they said, 'You are a dangerous element.
David E Hoffman
I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known.
Norman Mailer
If valleys are the dimples on the face of the earth, as Steven King once said, then Silicon Valley is the deepest, most sparkling dimple of them all.
Betty Dravis
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops.
Jon Ronson
A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.
Barbara Ehrenreich
You are a leader. It is time to lead. You must inspire, you must plan, you must make the world a better place.
Gemma Malley
The dream knows what they are waiting for, even if they don’t themselves.The end of everything.The moment when it reveals its miracle boy and all the eyes will look and their seeing will be horror and glory and wonder and it will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimensions, and open the doors and the work will breathe and dance in his shoes and the dream will be able to escape.
Lauren Beukes
It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot -- and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.
Hunter S. Thompson
People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
Norman Cousins
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Albert Camus
Because this injunction for all women to have children isn't in any way logical. If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet really doesn't need all of us to produce more babies.
Caitlin Moran
When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.
Charlie Jane Anders
Simply sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world
Allen Curnow
With the tension churning within us, knowing all the ways the earth is not yet as God intended it to be, we are driven to pray daily: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." We are not looking for an escape from the world; we are looking for the restoration of the world.
Jonathan Martin
I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn’t have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.
Jeannette Walls
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
You have all the time in the world when you know what you are doing.
Robert Ferrigno
The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.
Albert Camus
The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.
Albert Camus
Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.
Albert Camus
The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
Mitch Albom
He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.
Michael Finkel
No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --
Cory Doctorow
The world is made up of two classes - the hunters and the huntees.
Richard Connell
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
The world is not growing worse and it is not growing better -- it is just turning around as usual.
Finley Peter Dunne
...and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Jean Hatzfeld
A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.
Albert Camus
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
Albert Camus