Quotes by Journalists - Page 93

Talk of "witch-hunts" conceals an inconvenient fact: men charged with rape stand a better chance of walking free than other defendants. The conviction rate in rape trials – 63 per cent in 2012/13 – is quite a lot lower. Prosecutors are taking a bigger risk when they bring rape cases to court, especially when the alleged offences happened decades ago, leaving no forensic evidence.The Independent, 9 February 2014
Joan Smith
In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us.
Jean-Dominique Bauby
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
Jonny Steinberg
About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.
Jonny Steinberg
Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.
Jonny Steinberg
There is no point of relaying statistics on rape because for every figure given there are thousands missing, unreported. It is a shameful state we have created where a victim chooses to endure the pain and suffering, silenced by fear that judgment will come before justice.
Aysha Taryam
Gary Robinson died hungry.He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19. Drunk, loud, and obnoxious, he pushed ahead of seven customers on line at a fast-food chicken outlet. The counter girl told him that his behavior was impolite. She calmed him down with sweet talk, and he agreed to step to the end of the line. His turn came just before closing time, just after the fried chicken ran out.He punched the counter girl so hard her ears rang, and a security guard shot him—three times.
Edna Buchanan
Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.
Frank Herbert
I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases.
Mark Baker
How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!
Albert Camus
The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.
Amanda Craig
I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.
Boris Johnson
Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.
Kate Summerscale
If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?
David Simon
You cannot have a society of angels except in heaven
Michela Wrong
The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.
Christopher Hitchens
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
Joseph Pulitzer
Lead by inspiration, not intimidation.
Rebecca Aguilar
Dear Forrest, I am sorry there was no time for us to speech other before I left. The doctors made their decision quickly, and before I knew it, I was being taken away, but I asked if I could stop long enough to write you this note, because you have been so kind to me whileI was here. I sense, Forrest, that you are on the verge of something very significant in your life, some change, or event that will move you in a different direction, and you must seize the moment, and not let it pass. When I think back on it now, there is something in your eyes, some tiny flash of fire that comes now and then, mostly when you smile, and , on those infrequent occasions, I believe what I saw was almost a Genesis of our ability as humans to think, to create, to be. This war is to for you, old pal - nor me - and I am well out of it as I'm sure you will be in time. The crucial question is, what will you do? I don't think you're an idiot at all. Perhaps by the measure of tests or the judgement of fools, you might fall into some category or other, but deep down, Forrest, I have seen that glowing sparkle of curiosity burning deep in your mind. Take the tide, my friend, and as you are carried along, make it work for you, fight the shallows and the snags and never give up. You are a good fellow, forrest, and you have a big heart. Your pal, Dan
Winston Groom
I should learn patience, it's a shame there's no time for that.
Maija Haavisto
The weight of wait.
Cameron Conaway
My world, created by glass and flame in the birth of your heat, implodes inside the shadowed walls of my heart. I swallowed the shards you gave me, your eyes on mine. Nothing is easy. I wait, feeling your hands holding the shattered pieces of my soul together in the molten, darkest recesses of the heart you claimed, unwilling to give up. I am inside you, waiting to come out.
Rachel Thompson
The hundred-year-old man had never let himself be irritated by people, even when there was a good reason to be, and he was not annoyed by the uncouth manner of this youth.
Jonas Jonasson
To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?
Charles Finch
Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory in this way, but the moment the study are in insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.
Frank Herbert
The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth.
Frank Herbert
What to describe patience, how to check that? One may balance its anger, desire, feeling and burden of waiting, which show the routine attitude that one can adopt. However, the real test of one's patience appears when a naked woman invites in front of it; one ignores and avoids, to respond and react since that grasps the significant and substantial patience; it verifies that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one’s thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.
José Saramago
You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
Lionel Shriver
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
Mavis Gallant
So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.
Cameron Conaway
Life it too short to deal with crazy people.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland
He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.
Peter Heller
...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...
John Geddes
She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
All that is important comes in quietness and waiting.
Patrick Lindsay
you are a ring tone on the phone I didn’t answer
John Geddes
you know the way of the wind in the night—the desolate alleys my soul takes
John Geddes
Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.
Gabriel García Márquez
Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
Thor Benson
Reading is solitude.
Italo Calvino
I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
Anna Quindlen
The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.
José Saramago
The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.
Ernest Hemingway
Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.
Kate Bolick
I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.
Mihail Sebastian
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
Michael Finkel
He'd drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake's top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. "I'd stretch out in the water, " he said, "and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.
Michael Finkel
There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.
Michael Finkel
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Michael Finkel
We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.
Stacey May Fowles
Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.
Gabriel García Márquez
He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
Richard Preston
I understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.
Michael Finkel
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
Karl Kraus
I've always believed that the only defeats and victories that matter in life are those you lose or win alone, against yourself.
Mihail Sebastian
I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
Djuna Barnes