Quotes by Journalists - Page 61

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes
Morality and honor are not to be confused. "The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H.L. Mencken
Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.
Carsten Jensen
Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.
Pete Hamill
Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma’am.
Colin Flaherty
The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.
H.L. Mencken
The standard of matrimony is erected by affection and purity, and does not depend upon the height, or bulk, or color, or wealth, or poverty of individuals. Water will seek its level; nature will have free course; and heart will answer to heart.
William Lloyd Garrison
That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us.""Who?" Lily asked."Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me."
Bebe Moore Campbell
I wanted to drag them all out, flay us all, destroy all the artificial separations of history. You'd merely done what I had, after all--split from two cells into four then eight then sixteen until you've accumulated all your arms and legs and organs and pushed yourself into the world--so fucking what? You honkey, nigger, spic, dyke, cunt. If I cry out, who will hear me?
Kelly J. Cogswell
Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset.
Douglas A. Blackmon
In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance.
Douglas A. Blackmon
I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.
Charles Portis
On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.
Joseph O'Connor
Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream…The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
Ta-Nahisi Coates
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.
Isabel Wilkerson
You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.
Jeannette Walls
My color is my joy and not my burden...
Bebe Moore Campbell
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.
Christopher Hitchens
...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...
Robert Harris
In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.
Upton Sinclair
When we decided to move West, I worried about how to defend my family and my stock from Indians, but I never worried about inheriting one!”--from Prairie Grace when Georgia's father Thomas realizes gravely ill Gray Wolf has been left at their doorstep
Marilyn Bay Wentz
Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. “Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people.”--from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans
Marilyn Bay Wentz
Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero
Gabriel García Márquez
He watched the young actress playing the central part of a wife who mistakenly believes her husband has wronged her. She was overly trained in the teapot school of acting, striking expressive poses and attitudes as the mood of the story demanded.
Stephen Harrigan
Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.
Robert Harris
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
Norman Mailer
To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that’s not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you...Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It’s revolution, invention, war. It’s big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not.
Joel Stein
Life,perhaps less a document than an impression,conveyed through partial glances,stream-of-consciousness juxtapositions,unpredictable rhythms, a collage of sound,a conscientious diarist,a career of blackmail and scandal culminated in murder,a blind man with a will of iron and a nervous system of gossamer.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Life is calmness with squabbling, accumulating traditions and self-consciousness. elaborate meals, medicine, law,pretty pictures unspoiled,rocking the cradle and holding the hammer, impressive skies of gray and blue, believing in what we can’t settle, the mystery of iniquity,the absolutely sincere predictions of fools,lighter moods like these.
Brian D'Ambrosio
When your in pain you slowly killing your self but when your happy you are repairing the pain that slowly killing you
Dondy Subingsubing
Perhaps I should explain to him that it has been my particular way of frustrating time's attrition, postponing death and sustaining the illusion that one can always erase everything and make a fresh start.
Nathacha Appanah
How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.
Robert Cormier
Truth, meanwhile, was a weaponthat even a damaged fist could still grasp and wield. It was a remarkably versatile commodity; it could be traded, or help serve an end, or produce aprofit.
Mark Allen Smith
Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.
Alex Haley
It's hard to make things right for everyone.""But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped.
Linwood Barclay
She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a mustache.
Mavis Gallant
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
You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
John Lanchester
Time erodes people, and when you are old enough you weigh nothing. It's comforting to know that I will never be as frail.
Maija Haavisto
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
Joan Didion
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
Joan Didion
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.
Joan Didion
When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say "Hey! This isn't an old lady's disease! We aren't old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!
Lisa Jey Davis
I call the Change of Life "Orchids" because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.
Lisa Jey Davis
After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
Louis Bayard
.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.
Anna Quindlen
...as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror...only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.
Gabriel García Márquez
We watch our bodies and our brains slow down as younger bodies and brains zip past us, and we just accept it, not realizing there is a whole world offering to sharpen and improve us. We simply need to look for it.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
You always thought older people were wiser. It's not that. It's just that our relatives are dead and we're able to speak freely.
Ariel Gore
Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.
Caitlin Moran
At eight-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.
Lionel Shriver
But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched.
Hunter S. Thompson
It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
Katherine Dunn
I have to start loving what comes next and stop hating I won't be a part of it.
Linda Robinson
That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Michael Lewis
To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.
Gabriel García Márquez