Quotes by Journalists - Page 84

He was mad and plenty brave.
Ernest Hemingway
Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)
Geraldine Brooks
Bravery shared doesn't act like bravado among her own.
Linda Robinson
When you name your child after a grotesque gigantic creature known for slaughtering hundreds of innocents for the sole purpose of entertainment (okay so they were illegal immigrants who entered his realm) you must have a slight idea how that would turn out.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns...
Matt Haig
Turning into a vampire is like signing a supernatural contract and like any contract, there are clauses.And there is the fine print.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
Laura Lippman
Could it really be this easy to land a handsome man? If so, why didn't I try it ages ago?
Steve Hockensmith
My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.
Lionel Shriver
I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish,” he said. “Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.
Ernest Hemingway
Worry and regret are both useless weights that provide no drag. They never did anything to slow down the planet for one goddamned second.
Andrew Smith
And he had a theory about fear. It was all about regret. If you make what you want out of life and don't bullshit yourself about your choices, then there are no regrets, and a man without regret isn't afraid of anything.
Mark Allen Smith
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
Albert Camus
Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious.
Michael Lewis
This was the first time I had not just rushed in and followed my instincts, and it wasn't working out. I was beginning to actively regret it.
Gwenda Bond
When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.
Miguel Syjuco
That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.
Daniel Alarcón
An introverted person obviously affected by her past. Lived alone, had no sex life, had difficulty getting close to people. Kept her distance, and when she let loose there was no restraint. She chose a stranger for a lover.
Stieg Larsson
If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
José Saramago
...when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.
Joan Didion
But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156
Chuck Klosterman
I'm surrounded by people and feel alone
Gayle Forman
I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain.
Joseph Roth
At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
Ernest Hemingway
It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone.
Ernest Hemingway
Do what we will, we are alone. The sooner we learn that, the better; and the more we are fit to be alone with ourselves, the more we are respectful to the individuality of others, and therefore the more we are fit to associate with our kind. This was a paradox she would have to learn for ourselves.
Howard Spring
There was a lot to be said for a man’s capacity to be comfortable while alone.
John Connolly
One's desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin--sometimes called the master chemical of sociability-- and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.
Michael Finkel
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
Albert Camus
There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have. A solution. A remedy. Anything. ...I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be. Somehow I knew I deserved this.
Brian Krans
...You say you don't mistrust me, yet you quote Chrysostom - Hell is paved with priests' skulls....
John Geddes
...you found me in my lonely labyrinth and like Beatrice, led me out of my own hell...
John Geddes
I smile thinly, to make it clear that this will happen when hell turns into a family friendly summer resort.
Lauren Beukes
We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere.""Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell.
John Connolly
Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.
J.M. Ledgard
Stuck in high school for the rest of my natural life. Talk about hell.
Cara Lynn Shultz
Damnation is eternal. That’s the whole point. Otherwise, what good would it do you?
Forrest Carr
We're all going to hell anyway, why not enjoy the ride?
Robert Ferrigno
And, as the storm of water thrashed the very pinnacles that toppled into mist, he had seen the ribs of cliff laid bare and bleeding—as it were the laceration of a living land that he looked on. Then, ‘Corne et tonnerre!’ he had seemed to cry to himself, ‘the very world is torn by some inhuman power, and flows to the sea in rivers of purple!’ and he heard the bells of the ocean receding innumerably, choke at their moorings, muffled and congested with the floating scum of carnage that no wind might ruffle and only God’s fire cleanse.Now, in a moment, he saw that what he had taken for land was in truth a great cliff built up of human bodies—a vast reserve of human force accumulated by, and for the use of, a single dominant will. And this cliff was washed by the waves of an ocean of blood, to which its life contributed in a thousand spouting rivulets. And it was compact of limitless pain; and the cry of torture never ceased within it. And suddenly the dreamer—as in the way of dreams—felt himself to be a constituent agony of that he gazed upon—a pulp of suffering self-contained, yet partaking of the wretchedness of all.
Bernard Capes
It must not be thought, however, that in pagan Ireland Fairyland was altogether conceived as a Hades or place of the dead. We have already seen that in some of its types and aspects it was inherently nothing of the sort; as when, for example, it came to be confused with the Land of the Gods. In all likelihood these separate paradises and deadlands of a nature so various were the result of the stratified beliefs of successive races dwelling in the same region. A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. The gods of vanquished races might be conceived as presiding over spheres of the dead for which their victors would have nothing but contempt, and which, because of that very contempt, might come to be conceived as hells or places of a debased and grovelling kind, pestiferous regions which only the spirits of despised "natives" or the undesirable might inhabit.
Lewis Spence
Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!
Charles Portis
As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'
Tom Vanderbilt
How many millions there are who don't want to go to Hell, but they don't want to get off the road to Hell.
Alan Cairns
Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.
Clarice Lispector
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.
Christopher Hitchens
Wesley's theology was, then, largely a theology of reaction. Most of his theological output had polemical overtones, and some works were devoted exclusively to that end. The direction and the intensity of the challenge determined the character and strength of his reply. When this is taken into account, there is no contradiction between his teaching on Baptism and on the Lord's Supper. The Protestant and Catholic strands in Wesley's thought are held together in both cases, but the expression of their relative importance depends on the situation which is being addressed.
John R. Parris
It was evangelicals' sense of rudderlessness - their desire for an authority to guide them in questions of dogma, life, and worship - that led them to rediscover liturgy and history in the first place. The irony was that in their smorgasbord approach to non-Protestant tradition, in their individualistic rejection of the rules of any one church in favor of a free run of the so-called church universal, in their repudiation of American nationalism in favor of cosmopolitanism, young evangelicals were being quintessentially evangelical and stereotypically American, doing as they pleased according to no authority but their own. The principle of sola scriptura was far clearer in theory than in practice. No matter evangelicals' faith that, with the 'illumination of the Holy Spirit,' 'Scripture could and should interpret itself,' too many illuminated believers came to different conclusions about what the Bible meant. Inerrantists who asserted their 'literal' interpretation with absolute certainty could do so only by covertly relying on modern, manmade assumptions. Other evangelicals were now searching for similar assurance in the authority of church history and the mystery of worship.
Molly Worthen
Even if one gives up the concept of God, there are quite a few recognized immaterial things that one has to struggle with. Things such as thought, truth, logic, morality, purpose, and justice become a real problem if the universe is simply material. One could say that these things are imaginary, but then they would have to explain the immaterial construct of imagination.
Joel Furches
Hence it's funny to read in the New York Times that liberal Catholic activists are pushing for a change in Church teaching on issues relating to -- well, let's admit it, sex. Nobody is out there demanding the popes revisit the condemnation of Jansenism (don't ask), or settle the question of whether divine grace is or isn't resistable. No, journalists want to know what the Church thinks about whether one person should poke another and, if so, where, when, and how. What liberal Catholics and the journalists who love them are really asking for isfor the Church to admit that it was teaching a set of harsh, repressive errors for nineteen centuries and that now it is very, very sorry.
John Zmirak
Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.
Lev Grossman
Jesus' tomb wasn't His grave, but our door.
Patricia Raybon
Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.""Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle."Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.""I've heard that story.""From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.
Manu Joseph
A beast barely able to restrain itself carried a risk to its master.
Robert Ferrigno
There’s a difference between a mistake and a regret. Everything up to this moment has made this moment. If you can change a mistake, then go out and do what you can to change it. If you can’t change it, there’s no use regretting it because it will just make you miserable. Live right now, even if that involves dealing with the consequences of your actions. Time travel always ends badly.
Rebecca McKinsey
If your gonna screw up, do it while you're young. Older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.
Winston Groom
You are on the side of angels. But even angels fall, sometimes. We all make mistakes; without them we would learn nothing.
Gemma Malley
My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.-Bono
Bryan Curtis
If you realise and accept your mistakes, faults and wrong doings, it is the exact way to recognising, getting and finding yourself, when it happens, you are a genius
Ehsan Sehgal
The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
Andy Rooney