Quotes by Journalists - Page 75

Mental illnesses grab you by the leg, screaming, and chow you down whole.They make you selfish. They make you irrational. They make you irrational. They make you self-absorbed. They make you needy. They make you cancel plans last minute. They make you not very fun to spend time with. They make you exhausting to be near.
Holly Bourne
her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.
Carol Lee
While she is still hospitalised, I take Emma out for strengthening walks, for her muscles and been under-used for a long time. She is sometimes breathless, I notice with concern, and there are other changes in her, either through a nerve her therapy touches, or through her illness, or both, which make her, quite often, disagreeable to be with.
Carol Lee
The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.
Carol Lee
Because now mental health disorders have gone “mainstream”. And for all the good it’s brought people like me who have been given therapy and stuff, there’s a lot of bad it’s brought too.Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.”NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT.“Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.”NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T.“I’m so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar.”SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE.Told you I got angry.These words – words like OCD and bipolar – are not words to use lightly. And yet now they’re everywhere. There are TV programmes that actually pun on them. People smile and use them, proud of themselves for learning them, like they should get a sticker or something. Not realizing that if those words are said to you by a medical health professional, as a diagnosis of something you’ll probably have for ever, they’re words you don’t appreciate being misused every single day by someone who likes to keep their house quite clean.People actually die of bipolar, you know? They jump in front of trains and tip down bottles of paracetamol and leave letters behind to their devastated families because their bullying brains just won’t let them be for five minutes and they can’t bear to live with that any more.People also die of cancer.You don’t hear people going around saying: “Oh my God, my headache is so, like, tumoury today.”Yet it’s apparently okay to make light of the language of people’s internal hell
Holly Bourne
...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)
Robert Whitaker
Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.
Carol Lee
Doesn' t she care what she does to her family? ' people will ask. ' How can she starve herself like that? 'She has fallen into bad company, been influenced from within by something she thought she could control, but which has ended up controlling
Carol Lee
If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient? (p. 30)
Robert Whitaker
Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA. How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive. Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.... I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline. The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.
Michael Prager
Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Marya Hornbacher
I nee to reason for a plague, ... As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us.
Gabriel García Márquez
Named Harris," Bill said. "Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.""Fortunate fellow," Mike said. "What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
Ernest Hemingway
Is my life, by any chance, about to take a new turn?
Jonas Jonasson
The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.
David Denby
He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.--Havana Red
Leonardo Padura
And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy's eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head
Linda Grant
His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.
Thomas Mullen
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
The captain of a ship can run a great ship, but he can't do anything about the tides.
Matthew Norman
To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.
Ernest Hemingway
I had gone...to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.
Ernest Hemingway
The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.
Émile Zola
Last night, lost in spaces between star—bays and lakes of clouds, I tossed and turned looking for you
John Geddes
I see you from afar—fragile and shy as a star gleaming through a cloudy rift
John Geddes
And I played music through the night, alone, echoing through the halls. My life, alive through note.
Jonathan P. Lamas
Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart-- and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him....-The Glamour of the Snow
Algernon Blackwood
Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.
Christopher Morley
An Evening AirI go out in the grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.In the gathering darkness a long, swift train suddenly Passes me like a lighting.Hard and ponderous and loud are the wheels.As ponderous as the darkness, and as beautiful.I look on, enchanted, and listen to the sounds of lamentationIn the soft fragrant air.The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, andA soft, low thing cries out in the distance,But the sounds are hard and heavy,In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.
Samar Sen
When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.
Khushwant Singh
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert Camus
Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing Night!Night of south winds! Night of the large, few stars!Still, nodding Night! Mad, naked, Summer Night!from Strophe 21, "Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.
Michka Assayas
He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.
Emma Brockes
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags”, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
We look at your eyes. The eyes carry the wounds. The eyes know damage. Damaged people recognize other damaged people, and we let you in. We are kindred. - Broken Places
Rachel Thompson
A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.
Jack London
In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.
Matt Ridley
Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.
J. Randy Taraborrelli
Progress has not brought about universal happiness...
Adam Leith Gollner
In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
Nate Silver
Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
Nate Silver
In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.
Meghna Pant
As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.
Nicholas Carr
Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.
George Monbiot
Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.
Walt Whitman
Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.
Cameron Conaway
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
Christopher Hitchens
The experience of history should lead us to hope and strive to make the world better, not to despair and resign ourselves to fate.
Alan Beattie
ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests.
Henry Hazlitt
The financial markets are not to be trusted. They expect to be given free reign to make huge profits while the sun is shining, but hasten to the shelter of the state when the skies darken.
Peter Stalker
...The reason why we’re strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money—and pragmatic concerns, like money.
Ruth Fowler
Goods are traded, but services are consumed and produced in the same place. And you cannot export a haircut. But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut do you want? Which barber do you want? All those things can and will be done by a call center far away.
Thomas L. Friedman
The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.
Michael Pollan
Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths."How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for.
Aditya Chakrabortty