Quotes by Journalists - Page 247

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman
It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.
Mitch Albom
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell
[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
Lev Grossman
Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
Jeannette Walls
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
Mitch Albom
Going back to something is harder than you think.
Mitch Albom
You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
Mitch Albom
Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.
Mitch Albom
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.
Christopher Hitchens
Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for
Oliver James
What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
Christopher Hitchens
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
Hunter S. Thompson
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
Ernest Hemingway
Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.
Patricia McCormick
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
Heinrich Heine
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Ernest Hemingway
O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer.That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Walt Whitman
I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
Walt Whitman
Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
Mitch Albom
I would rather be ashes than dust!I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.The function of man is to live, not to exist.I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.I shall use my time.
Jack London
There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...
Mitch Albom
A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.
John Grogan
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
Gabriel García Márquez
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
Albert Camus
I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.
Gayle Forman
Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.
Mitch Albom
When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.
Hunter S. Thompson
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
Albert Camus
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
Jack London
People are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat--that's the only moral they know.
Dany Laferrière
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Ernest Hemingway
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
Hunter S. Thompson
why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out
Oliver James
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
Hunter S. Thompson
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
Mitch Albom
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
Hunter S. Thompson
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
Mitch Albom
This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
George V. Higgins
But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
Gabriel García Márquez
Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
Peter Heller
Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.
Gabriel García Márquez
I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.
Ernest Hemingway
to love means to realize there is a time to let the beloved one go
Tony Parsons
Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
Gabriel García Márquez
He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you
Gabriel García Márquez
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H.L. Mencken
Never fall in love?""Always," said the count. "I am always in love.
Ernest Hemingway
I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.
Mitch Albom
and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.
Gabriel García Márquez
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
Dorothy Day