Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm trying to see my own country with fresh eyes.
We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.
I think when you start to get afraid, it's time to leave.
Mourning has a pace and rhythm of its own. It cannot be rushed.
For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.
If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.
If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.
If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.
As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get.
A mourner is, perforce, a person with a story. The pity is, how very rarely it gets told.
I believe the consequences of a war are so harsh that it should be always the last resort.
Bush told me, he doesn't watch TV ... though it's untrue that he doesn't read the newspapers.
There is nothing I would change - to change it I would have had to write a totally different book.
Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things.
Even in a war, someone has to take care of daily life. Someone has to feed and clothe the children.
When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.
Often doctors didn't even tell you what was wrong with you. They just treated you, and sent you home.
There is no journalist without opinions, and there's no real objectivity, but we can strive toward it.
As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.
It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in.
Alas, this mundane realm is never as fun as the one inside our minds. But we can endeavor to make it so.
Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.
If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.
If my name had not been cleared, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to continue as a journalist.
I have very little patience for ignorant, incompetent people who don’t care that they’re ignorant and incompetent.
There are personal reasons, psychological reasons, but there could also be political reasons for becoming a terrorist.
The laws are still very unclear. Cells are still taken from people without consent - a lot of people don't realize it.
As a journalist, you sort of grind away, taking rejections as they come, building on whatever advances you've achieved.
I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.
The judgment means a lot. As a journalist being accused of invading someone's privacy, there is always a risk that it will stick to your name.
I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write.
Bush made a point of emphasizing to me that unlike his father's administration, his was one of significant "walk-in access" to the Oval Office.
We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.
Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.
The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the countrys constitution as the fundamental pillar of society.
Bush always has viewed himself as an "activist," which flies in the face of some conservative notions, such as the federal government's role in education.
The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the country's constitution as the 'fundamental pillar of society'.
As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.
To mourn is to be extraordinarily vulnerable. It is to be at the mercy of inside feelings and outside events in a way most of us have not been since early childhood.
If Bruce Springsteen, Harlan Howard, or Tom Waits can tell a character's whole story in four minutes, maybe you don't need as many words as you think to make an impact.
The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.
I don't think of Bush as a particularly angry person - if anything, he has a facility for not harboring grudges, for letting things roll off of his back after momentarily bristling.
The sort of thinking at the time was, 'Well, we're giving you access to medical care which you wouldn't otherwise be able to get, so your payment is that we get to use you in research.'
I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.
But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.
For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.
I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.
Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.
It was my intent all along to write a nonjudgmental narrative of Bush's presidency. Along the way, a number of liberal friends of mine expressed disgust that I would spend time on such an endeavor.