Quotes by Journalists - Page 36

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.
Katherine Boo
Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.
Khushwant Singh
One Said, 'My grandfather once planted a Langra tree but, before he could eat the fruit, he had to marry it to another tree. A tamarind. Custom decreed it.''I know about that custom,' said a colleague. 'The jasmine is considered a suitable bride for a mango.
Alexander Frater
At the last moment, the fish and I exchange a troubled glance. The murrel seems to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I am in no position to start justifying the unusual treatment. What comes next is a new experience for both the fish and me.
Tahir Shah
Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins.
Gideon Haigh
Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.
Lev Grossman
In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation.Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not 'mad'—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?
Boris Johnson
...she wasn't reading Deathly Hallows at all. Her book wasn't orange but rose and water and sand, and featured a kid on a broomstick and white unicorn. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. She didn't notice me staring at her. 'Oh, I envy you,' I thought, but was smiling for her. She had just begun.
Melissa Anelli
The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us, because if we are not able to land at least we are able to follow. (July 20, 1969 CBS Moon Landing Coverage)” ― Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite
…Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Ernest Hemingway
I'd often slip and fall on the ice after last call, which explained the ever-present welts. If I were with a woman, I'd usually execute a precautionary vomit in the men's room in an effort avoid any ugly incidents once I got her back to her place. And they say chivalry is dead.
Dan Dunn
I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.
Penelope Mortimer
Sala called for more drink and Sweep brought four rums, saying they were on the house. We thanked him and sat for another half hour, saying nothing. Down on the waterfront I could hear the slow clang of a ship’s bell as it eased against the pier, and somewhere in the city a motorcycle roared through the narrow streets, sending its echo up the hill to Calle O’Leary. Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street. Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.
Hunter S. Thompson
Writers choose to drink because of their inability to cope with the daily hassles of being part of a society. Why shouldn’t they? Every day an intelligent human being is plagued with bills, horrifying news stories and general idiocy that slowly grinds away at their psyche, breaking off pieces of it that may never fit again.
Thor Benson
Rum is tonic that clarifies the vision,and sets things in true perspective.
Brian D'Ambrosio
OK for now. I enjoyed my quick, high-powered visit over there and look forward to a dead-game replay when I'm in better condition. Tell Hinckle he'd better take some liver exercises...and also to get braced for my wild cards, which don't always mix well with grapefruit juice and burbon.- To Peter Collier 10/11/1967
Hunter S. Thompson
Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.
Charlie Jane Anders
About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody and reflective, it opened the gate to all their memories, and left them sad, hungering for things they could not name.
Norman Mailer
Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people. To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help.
Larissa MacFarquhar
Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint’s crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.
Cole Alpaugh
They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But I have found that the ones who drink milkshakes don't win many ball games.
Fred McMane
Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.
Jimmy Breslin
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
Mitch Ratcliffe
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway
I drink to make other people more interesting.
Ernest Hemingway
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Ernest Hemingway
There’s no standard career path to becoming a deconstructor of wrongness,
David H. Freedman
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
Chuck Klosterman
I hate him, too," she shivered. "I hate his damned suffering.
Earnest Hemingway
When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Hell's Angels act.
Hunter S. Thompson
For the first time in years, his heart raced, and the old excitement flickered inside him. The excitement of impending battle, clash of arms, danger and glory. Cei had almost forgotten it. To be alive, on the very cusp of death, was the greatest feeling of all.
David Pilling
Young warriors are always eager for battle. Old warriors know better.
Robert Ferrigno
Battle is a frightening thing, a terrible thing, but once you develop a taste for it…nothing else comes close.
Robert Ferrigno
Nice jewelry and a boys corpse. Oh you're so pretty.
Koushun Takami
Forever isn't important-it's now that counts. Doing the right thing.
Gemma Malley
It could be a work of art among vendettas
Frank Herbert
Mind the gap, Jack
Andrew Smith
I knew I loved you when I kept trying to run away and find reasons why it wouldn’t work
John Geddes
It's the same thing with faith, by the way." We don't want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don't want to commit to God. We'll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power‎-‎-‎-in faith and in marriage."And if you don't commit? I asked."Your choice. But you miss what's on the other side."What's on the other side?"Ah." He smiled, "A happiness you cannot find alone.
Mitch Albom
Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it's a relationship, a business or a hobby.
Neil Strauss
She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite.
Graeme Thomson
I didn't simply want children - I probably could have found someone who would have been willing to do the baby thing - I wanted them with her. I longed to see the sparkle of her eyes in the eyes of a child; to have that infectious laugh of hers coming out of a baby's mouth as I tickled them; I wanted to hold a child in my arms and look at it and see her and me, our genes combined to make another human being. When it came to me that that would never happen, I put my fist through the back door. All these little things kept coming to me, all the "I'll nevers", but that was the worst one. I grieved for the children we'd never have almost as much as I'd grieved for her.
Dorothy Koomson
I've come to realize that you can fight a lot of things in life, but you can't help who you love. You can't change who your heart chooses. I'm afraid that very fact will be the greatest tragedy of my life.
Sarah Jio
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
Sally Brampton
...Myths aren’t fairy tales or legends—they’re an honest attempt to explain mysteries...
John Geddes
Don’t you know that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?
P.L. Travers
I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.
John Lanchester
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.
Ernest Hemingway
With each beat, the heart pumps nearly three ounces of blood into the arteries--seventy-five to ninety gallons an hour when the body is at rest.
Ariel Gore
Sweat seems to bleed / like pride from their bones.
Cameron Conaway
She stood above the sink and broke the Swarovski glass frame – a wedding gift – with her hands. Her thumb got cut. As blood drops fell into the sink, like mercury balls she thought, she lit the photo on fire. Ashes fell into the sink. Fire and vermilion. Ashes and blood. Her marriage from start to finish.
Meghna Pant
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.
Matt Ridley
private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it.
Henry Hazlitt
From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other:"A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy.Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in.A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory.If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception.Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field.The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God.
Lynne McTaggart
At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
Christopher Hitchens
The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.
Ernest Hemingway
Misdirection. False signals. Spreading confusion. This is the Tao of deception.
David Ignatius