Quotes by Journalists - Page 35

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
Anna Quindlen
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
Christopher Morley
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was - and is - home plate.
Brock Yates
The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.
Frank Rich
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.
Christopher Morley
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?
Walt Whitman
Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,Rude by day and lewd by night…Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name's delirium.
Byron Rufus Newton
True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.
Jimmy Breslin
You haven't lived until you died in New York.
Alexander Woollcott
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
Theodore Dreiser
When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.
Jimmy Breslin
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Russell Baker
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Albert Camus
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
Joan Didion
It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.
Maeve Brennan
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Tom Wolfe
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Hal Borland
When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.
Roy Blount Jr.
So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer.
Roy Blount Jr.
We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
We were enjoying one of those rare summers of utter freedom – no financial responsibility, no debts, no time owing to anybody.
Jojo Moyes
Brooke was always my summer. She’ll always be my summer. And I had already made my choice a long time ago. Loving Brooke was what I was made to do.
Laura Miller
Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth- every day I have ever had- was secretly sunny after all....I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer.
Caitlin Moran
August was nearly over - the month of apples and falling stars, the last care-free month for the school children. The days were not hot, but sunny and limpidly clear - the first sign of advancing autumn.
Victor Nekrasov
Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.
Stephanie Clifford
I can see the little girl, the face of the little girl. And as much as people say that they don't care about these people and all that, I don't care about these people - but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense. They don't want to help themselves, they're blowing us up, yeah, that hurts, but it also hurts to know that I've seen a girl that's as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don't care if she's Iraqi, Korean, African, white - she's still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody.
David Finkel
He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.
Theodore Dreiser
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
Gabriel García Márquez
You will never win if you never begin.
Helen Rowland
Win without boasting. Lose without excuse.
Albert Payson Terhune
You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.
Albert Camus
I looked around the barroom. Someone else might have seen nothing more than a random crowd of drinkers, but I saw my people. Kith and kin. Every sort of person was there – stockbrokers and safecrackers, athletes and invalids, mothers and supermodels – but we were as one. We’d all been hurt by something, or somebody, and so we’d all come to Publicans, because misery loves company, but what it really craves is a crowd.
J.R. Moehringer
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
George Orwell
As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.
Eric Weiner
Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.
John Connolly
And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!
Émile Zola
I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.
Gabriel García Márquez
People tell me I excel in Public Relations, what I suck at are private affairs.
Ioana-Cristina Casapu
This is the worst thing about waiting for someone. You have to look good all the time because they could turn up at any minute and see you before you've seen them
Mark Mason
He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn’t matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
Barbara Demick
You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.
Mitch Albom
There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.
Richard Wagamese
The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
Nuala O'Faolain
One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.
Mitch Albom
Comparing how you feel on the inside (bad) to the way someone else looks on the outside (great) is a losing proposition. It's an impossible standard.
Maria Shriver
I lifted my eyes, and, for the first time, admitted the truth."I gave up," I whispered."Don't give up," she whispered back.
Mitch Albom
Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.
Tahir Shah
Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.
Khushwant Singh
Prideep pointed to the flames of paraffin lamps as they came alive in the distance and cackled in awe at the experience. (…) I was to discover that making tasty soup with one carrot, ten peas and a little dishwater, was his greatest skill. One wondered what the man would be capable of creating with a blender and a non-stick frying-pan.
Tahir Shah
There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow.
Tarun J. Tejpal
In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.
Jerry Pinto
He was the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or a son-in-law in business or real estate
Sanjaya Baru
The main goal of the regulatory policy has been to control the size of Mumbai by penalizing any new development, fearing that economic success would attract more people.’ Yes, we have deliberately planned for our cities to fail. That has been our intent. If they succeed, then more people would move there, ‘who would have to share an already deficient and immutable infrastructure’. Bertaud concludes: ‘This is a very pessimistic view of urban development.' An understatement, so classically French!
Mihir S. Sharma
In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems.We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man.Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things.
Tarun J. Tejpal
On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.
Edward Luce
13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren’t good. Here’s why: in the years from 1972 to 1983—not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity—the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year—almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won’t find one.
Mihir S. Sharma
The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Aatish Taseer
If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular.
Salil Tripathi