Quotes by Journalists - Page 62

It was a relief to inhabit someone else's life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character's problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.
Alexandra Robbins
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
Isaac Deutscher
I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyretechnics associated with us
Bob Woodward
I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.
Amanda Craig
always enjoying reading books
Belal Fadl
How I love - writing, acting, breathing the atmosphere- and one day I'll have it. If I cannot write, I shall die.
Lily Koppel
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge light.
Caitlin Moran
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: An addict and a non-addict don’t think the same — their brains are wired completely differently. Only an addict can help another addict through recovery.
Greg Prato
MARK ARM : Even if I did talk to [Layne Staley], I don’t know what I would have said. Seeing him so far down the line on this trajectory that he had set for himself made me queasy. It seemed to me like once he discovered heroin, he decided he was going to fully embrace it. Based on the songs on Dirt, he just jumped in. There was no turning back. It was unfortunate and pathetic. That was the myth he made for himself, and he was living it out.
Greg Prato
John G. turns on him, hands on hips, hair caked with snow. 'Hey, buddy, let me tell you something. Drugs are the only thing I got. I am a drug addict. That's all I've ever been and that's all I'll ever be. Even if I'm not putting a needle in my arm or pipe in my mouth right this second, the thought is still in my mind.' He taps the side of his head. 'And if I decide I'm gonna get high to deal with the pressures in my life, there's not a fuckin' thing you can do about it.
Peter Blauner
As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?
David Carr
End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.
David Carr
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
David Carr
YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: I would always tell him, “Layne [Staley], why don’t you take off, go to some deserted island, hire the best counselors, and just kick this shit? Go for six months if you have to.” And his rebuttal was, “Johnny, I have celebrity status and I have a lot of money. I could fly planes out to deliver me the dope if I wanted to — and that’s what I would do. I can’t escape.
Greg Prato
Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.
Ann Marlowe
When she walks in that first Monday, of course I am awake - I am always up these days - I decide to lay it down. “Look”, I say, “I snort Ritalin. That’s what I do. I snort it all day long. I crush up the pills and inhale them like cocaine. I’m up to about forty a day. I can’t stop. I am planning to get help, to check into rehab or something like that, as soon as this book is finished. In the meantime, I can’t stop, and I am not going to.” She looks at me impassively. “I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t have to see. Either way, it’s going to happen, so it’s just about how bad it’s going to make you feel to watch.”She doesn’t seem to know what to say. She stares. I think she is going to cry. I think she wants to give me a hug, maybe, but there is an invisible cage, a delicate netting of glass, an ice sculpture surrounding me that no one can walk through. I’m cold. I’ve frozen into someone who just can’t be touched. I dare you to try.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.
Pitigrilli
There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.
Marya Hornbacher
At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.
Marya Hornbacher
Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word 'new' lose it's luster? Now the past is supposed to hold the hopes we once confided to the future. We're directing attachments that used to go forward backward.
Ann Marlowe
For him (LBJ) food was not an indulgence but and intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one he could never fill up.
Jonathan Darman
I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these two?
Sarah Hepola
It wasn't fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan's pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer.
Sarah Hepola
I had this great idea: I should get a job. Freelancing came with freedom, but maybe what I required was a cage.
Sarah Hepola
I grew up being told, "If you do marijuana you'll be a slave for the rest of your life," and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, "If you take LSD you'll be a slave for the rest of your life. Then it got to be, "If you take cocaine, you'll be slave for life." There was a time when I thought, "Hey, I've been taking Heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on weekends." I actually believed that you didn't have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don't lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don't tell people it is, because they'll found out it doesn't, then when they get to the stuff that really WILL, they ain't gonna believe you." - Dickie Peterson
Jon Wiederhorn
I felt utterly stripped of safety and love. And so, what tormented me most as I shook through August of 1988 wasn’t the nausea and chills but the recurring fear that I’d never have lasting comfort or joy again.
Maia Szalavitz
I look away from her. “I have felt like an old man my whole life. And they get to have fun and snort their fucking drugs and get wasted and it doesn’t matter who they’re hurting because they’re young and having fun and I’m a judgmental prick if I say anything.” “Do you think they’re having fun?” I don’t have an answer for her. “I’ll never be able to compete against it.” “Maybe you don’t understand how powerful it is,” she says. “How powerful is it?” “Very.” “And that’s an excuse?” “No.” “When do they get to take responsibility?” “For themselves?” she asks. “Yes.” “Always,” she says.
Kenny Porpora
Sometimes I think, Was she thinking about me when she was drinking? Did any of them ever think about me when they were putting straws in their noses and needles in their arms? Did they even think about me once?” And she asks me, “What would it mean if they didn’t?” I stare at her, trembling. She knows what I think it means, and she wants me to say it out loud.
Kenny Porpora
Why then do we wonder that heroin is everywhere? In our isolation, heroin thrives; that's its natural habitat. And our very search for painlessness led us to it. Heroin is, I believe, the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years. It turns every addict into narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary hyper-consumers. A life that finds opiates urns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product - the drug that makes being alone not just all right, but preferable.
Sam Quinones
Too much of a good thing is toxic
Aysha Taryam
The first few days felt quite surreal for gone was that filtered world of perfect angles made up of peoples’ best moments and selves. Gone was the wormhole that one jumped into at the sign of any awkward silence or pause in conversation.
Aysha Taryam
I got addicted. News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes.
Dan Rather
So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?" she asks."Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?""I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.
Lauren Beukes
We've been sold a dream of savings and investing that had no basis in any history or reality. We were participants in a vast experiment, a hope that personal finance and investments would do it all for us. We now know that for all too many people, it did not.
Helaine Olen
Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predisposition to the dark side, you become corrupted. In addition to which, those attracted to Wall Street have a predisposition to greed.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
There is no romance without finance.
John Fox
No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily - or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.
Edwin Lefèvre
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Matt Taibbi
Those who say don't know, those who know don't say
Michael Lewis
The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
Matt Taibbi
If you owe ten pounds to the Bank of England, you get thrown in jail, but if you owe a million pounds, they invite you to sit on the Board
Philippe Riès
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.
Ernest Hemingway
They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to tradeother people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality.
Brett Scott
Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...
Robert Harris
...we've let go of so many things, but never each other's hand ...
John Geddes
He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart.
Mitch Albom
Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.
Sally Brampton
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that's what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
Mitch Albom
You don't have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.
Jojo Moyes
Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.
Whittaker Chambers
Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per cent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the world. A third are male. One study revealed that over 50 per cent of prostitutes are the children of alcoholics or substance abusers, and 90 per cent are deflowered through incest or rape. Ninety-one per cent of prostitutes do not speak of the abuse. (The truth of life is told through the language of behavior.) Abused children suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, self-destructive impulses, suspicion, fear. Seventy-five per cent of prostitutes attempt suicide. (Imagine their scrapbook of memories.)
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
Aleksandar Hemon
On the perfect night there is nothing more transcendent or terrifying than boxing. It's the ultimate representation of the guilty pleasure.
Brian D'Ambrosio
I'm sorry about what happened,' Love said. Death squeezed his hand. 'Play as yourself. Not as me. Trust me one that.
Martha Brockenbrough
Hey, S.T.," Sydney says finally. I don't budge. She nudges me with her elbow. "You want to know something?"I still can't look up. But I nod."It's not your fault either." She says this like it's not big deal. Like it's nothing.But it's everything.
Patricia McCormick
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
Albert Camus
We are not on our fours, howling in the woods, only because guilt saves us.
Nelson Rodrigues
She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of hom took pleas; to had internalised their guilt so deeply that, aven after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime.
The New Yorker Magazine
My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.
Trevor Cole