Quotes by Journalists - Page 183

I know you don't want to be me. But I'd hate for you to ever feel like you're in my shadow. You're not and you never will be. You are awesome, and there is some kind of amazing future waiting for you.
Gwenda Bond
This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can't chew your way out of.
Lauren Beukes
Those close to [Patricia Highsmith], particularly her family, often commented on how Highsmith's vision of reality was a warped one. In April 1947, she transcribed into her notebook what was, presumably, a real dialogue between herself and her mother, in which Mary accused her of not facing the world. Highsmith replied that she did indeed view the world 'sideways, but since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective.' The problem, Highsmith said, was that her psychic optics were different to those around her, but if that was the case, her mother replied, then she should equip herself with a pair of new spectacles. Highsmith was not convinced. 'Then I need a new birth,' she concluded.
Andrew Wilson
--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.
Camilla Way
Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.
Joan Didion
As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give—“a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.” People wonder about his calm and even-keeled manner, the [P]resident observed. He credited the temperament he was born with and the fact that “from a very early age, I always felt I was loved and that my mother thought I was special.
Janny Scott
Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.
Scaachi Koul
If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working.
Scaachi Koul
He listens when I talk.
Gwenda Bond
To the members of my family who are no longer with us, I’d like to say I’m sorry. There is a quote by Stephen Dunn I’ve always loved; he says, “Our parents died at least twice, the second time when we forgot their stories.” I hope by remembering your stories, the good and the bad, you can forgive me for sharing parts of your lives you may have wished to have kept private.
Kenny Porpora
For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.
Cristina García
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
Michael Finkel
Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
Alex Haley
Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).
Christopher Hitchens
From "Caleb's Crossing"--This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers."Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me.
Geraldine Brooks
It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.
Peter Biskind
In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.
Helen Brown
It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents' lives before I was born.
Robert Drewe
Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.
Jane Jacobs
In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
Christopher Hitchens
[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.
Jeannette Walls
The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
Mitch Albom
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
George Orwell
Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. tOh, Mary Lou.tMy baby.tMy love.
Pete Hamill
Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
Mitch Albom
Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.
Gayle Forman
I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.
David Sheff
Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere
Peter Abrahams
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
Alex Haley
When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.
Katherine Dunn
You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can’t trade them in. You can’t lie to them. You can’t run two at once, substituting back and forth.“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.
Mitch Albom
I do have a point to all this,” she continues. “There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family.” She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. “You still have a family,” she whispers.
Gayle Forman
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
Michael Pollan
It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
Mitch Albom
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.
Mitch Albom
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough
Walt Whitman
God awaits us with open arms; we need only to take a step toward him like the Prodigal Son. But if, weak as we are, we don't have the strength to take that step, just the desire to take it is enough.
Andrea Tornielli
What had he said about machines?”Block was not entirely sure about that. Something about their eventually being able to think, something which the woman said was at odds with the Christian view of things, just like his sexual inclinations.
David Lagercrantz
...I realized how naive I was. My aunt Tina was right: this stuff does exist, and it does hurt people, and although there are lots of people at Liberty who condemn violence against gays--including Dr. Falwell himself--the number of students who want to give them the Goliath treatment isn't zero. In fact, the number who live in my room isn't zero.
Kevin Roose
Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Ambrose Bierce
As you become more present in your own life, you will begin to enlighten others by your example.
Germany Kent
Once you believe that you can do something, there is not a single person in the universe who can convince you otherwise.
Germany Kent
If you don't put anything in place, do not expect miraculous results to appear.
Germany Kent
when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?'I decided I'm going to live---or at least try to live---the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
Mitch Albom
The truth no matter how hard it is to bear, must be accepted and confronted head on because it is real. Businesses and people who accept truth soar.
Germany Kent
The only way to get the ending you want is to write your own story.
Ashley Ford
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
David Brooks
He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...
George Orwell
Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world's wisdom could be contained & lost.
Clarice Lispector
So self-assured were they all by nature that it never occurred to me to doubt that their perfection was predetermined by forces I did not understand. They were all royalty. They were all gods. They were all broken.
Chelsey Philpot
She crossed her legs and kicked out her feet, clad in thick wool socks and boots big enough to house a little old lady.
Drew Magary
Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.
Lev Grossman
Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.
Naomi Wolf
Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.
Tahir Shah
We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.
Arthur Machen
Real life this fdar had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book... By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters... wandered through places of danger, their destinies, ostensibly, within our grasp.
Ethan Gilsdorf
Who needs sports stardom when you can shoot fireballs from your fingertips?
Ethan Gilsdorf
We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).
John Connolly
Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.
John Connolly
Explosions and fighting robots and shit. What’s that got to do with the heart?
Lauren Beukes