Quotes by Journalists - Page 53

I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.
Geraldine Brooks
Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with woman you love.Well, what remains in your skin ,your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.In other words, auto suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don't know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you'd kill him.But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it's possible to look at him without horror; and believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you'd approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you have reached my degree of perfection, you'd actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he's a good chap.In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy.
Pitigrilli
Why wasn't I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she's tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn't nicer.
Gayle Forman
Besides, I'm not jealous. I'm just so in love with you that there isn't anything else.
Ernest Hemingway
A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
Lionel Shriver
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
Ian Fleming
I'm a sucker for a man who giggles—not a high-pitched serial-killer sort of giggle, but a lighthearted laugh.
Jancee Dunn
The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it's like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.
Gayle Forman
She [Nana] listened to his [Steiner's] propositions, turning them down every time with a shake of the head and that provocative laughter which is peculiar to full-bodied blondes.
Émile Zola
To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise
David Finkel
Willem laughs again. The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it's like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.
Gayle Forman
Readers of history may decide that joking while two guys are driving around through a town that has recently been slaughtered by six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with shark-tooth-studded arms is in poor taste.It is.But that is exactly what real boys have always done when confronted with the brutal aftermath of warfare.
Andrew Smith
She laughs, and that's really all he wanted.
Lauren Beukes
It was at a conference in Cyprus in 1976, where the theme was the rights of small nations, that I first met Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very important one. When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure. At first the very picture of professorial rectitude, with faultless tweeds, cravats, and other accoutrements (the pipe also being to the fore), he would react to a risqué remark, or a disclosure of something vaguely scandalous, as if a whole Trojan horse of mirth had been smuggled into his interior and suddenly disgorged its contents. The build-up, in other words, was worth one's effort.
Christopher Hitchens
Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie.
Matt Haig
Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
Brenda Ueland
This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.
Barbara Ehrenreich
You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.
Albert Camus
Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you
Julian Assange
To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.
George Orwell
Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don't like to put up with that level of insane unless there's some kind of high-calorie compensation.
Lauren Beukes
But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9
Will Self
If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
George Orwell
But if love can be funny and capricious, it can also be strong enough to seem like a sign of insanity.
Chelsey Philpot
You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world
Suki Kim
We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.
Frank Herbert
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
Arthur Koestler
In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.
Michael Paterniti
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
George Orwell
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
George Orwell
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.
Mark Helprin
There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.
Zoë Heller
The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson
You’re his normality. You’re a part of him, and he is a part of you. That’s what makes this frightening, but that’s what makes it right.
Becky Wicks
Love isn't all sparks and firecrackers. Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.
Becky Wicks
I want to hear one more of your storiesTangle up in your dreams, give up the fight‘Pour one more glass of that wineAnd I might not go home tonight...
Becky Wicks
She really liked you, Noah,''Yeah, well, maybe I'm just an asshole.'I realize my hand is still in his hair and I retract it quickly. He grabs it, holds it against him. You're not an asshole I'm thinking, but for some reason I can't say it. It would be like admitting something else; like the fact that he's an asshole to every girl who likes him, but never to me. And then I'd have to really think about why that is and that's not something I'll ever be comfortable with at all, even though his eyes are like maps and his words are like anchors and his songs are like personal messages and I love all that.- Chloe
Becky Wicks
fingers of wind combed the lake into ridges—icy palm prints glistened wherever it rested
John Geddes
For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.
Robert Harris
The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. .... The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.
Charles Finch
Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths...
Mike Bond
For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.
Gary Kamiya
I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.
Alice Steinbach
However, were we to invite you to drink a beaker of fresh oxidane, you may [sic] think we'd gone mad. Oxidane is used to cool nuclear reactors and it's found everywhere as a simple, cheap solvent. The oceans are full of it; we are full of it and life cannot exist without it. It's just a fancy name for water and it's possible (if impractical) to make the stuff with no more than some hydrogen and a match!
Kavin Senapathy
Five million people die unnecessarily each year because of illness related to lack of potable water. Half of them are children under the age of five. To bring it home, think about this: one child dies from lack of clean water every twelve seconds.
Thomas M. Kostigen
What an incomparable creature is the sea! ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard- ice. Sometimes it was soft- snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless- clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible- vapor- floating up into the the sky like the soals of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water forgranted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.
Jeannette Walls
They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow
Lauren Beukes
You know all is not well when Hell resorts to outsourcing to close deals made with the Devil. Or in this case, a guy named Stan.
Carl Begai
He was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end.
Gabriel García Márquez
Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.
Michael Lewis
Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.
Alec Wilkinson
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn't random.
Malcolm Gladwell
Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.
Malcolm Gladwell
I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me.
Abbas Al-Akkad
..he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,..
Gabriel García Márquez
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child
Robert D. Harris
...you are not what you seem - you're a Sylph - you leave and the air retains your image - you haunt me...
John Geddes