Quotes by Women Journalists

A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all.

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance.

Flora Rheta Schreiber

One of the stock Sydney jokes is of the census-taker who enquires: 'How many children have you, ma'am?' 'Two living and three in Melbourne.'

Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.

To Albert Spear, who having always denied knowledge of the Holocaust had said that he was at fault in having 'looked away':

You cannot look away from something you don't know. If you looked away, then you knew.

We all struggle alone through the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows of our lives.

What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.

Caitlin Flanagan

Mr. Black Man, watch your step! Ethiopia's queens will reign again, and her Amazons protect her shores and people! Strengthen your shaking knees, and move forward, or we will displace you and lead on to victory and to glory.

Amy Jacques Garvey

If you have even a smidgen of doubt that you'll be able to stay away from racking up additional debt, don't do it.

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion.
Rage.

Nobody should be authorized to describe the dissolution of a man, still less to do so for money or sensationalism. In the name of human dignity, there should be a prohibition against baring the private lives of others.

Mary Welsh Hemingway

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Patience was not something that came naturally to me, but in cooking it is the quintessential skill.

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman's body?

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.

Alexandra Fuller

It's not a woman's task—to hate and to kill. Not for us … We had to persuade ourselves. To talk ourselves into it.

Svetlana Alexievich

A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn't make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs.

For most of my life I have known how to control my feelings. If you can control your feelings, you can pretty much control your whole world. It's amazingly effective.

Decca Aitkenhead

The graveyards are full of women whose houses were so spotless you could eat off the floor. Remember the second wife always has a maid.

Heloise Bowles Cruse

The country of the aged is a land few people think very hard and seriously about before the time of life when they sense that they're arriving there. Somehow, throughout much of life, being old seems to be something that happens to other people.