Women Journalists From The United States

"The memory of one who is taken into the heart of a little child is kept forever green."

"Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking."

"What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you."

"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"There were classes and professors I liked, but I had no professional aspirations."

"They [Beijing journalist expatriates] liked talking to people and being in the city. They didn’t live in gated communities with maids."

"I hope they’re treated as kindly as the white guys who are dead weight at their venture funds and who mismanage their companies, but are given third and fourth and fifth chances. The change is always slow and imperfect, but it has to start somewhere."

"If you believe you’ll have to try and fail a lot to make a killer product, it’s not a bad idea to work on fun, lighthearted and relatively cheap products that you can quickly learn from."

"The fact that women and men are willing to talk openly about abuse, harassment and bullying is a huge improvement."

"Operating system updates are like a periodic hazing ritual."

"I’m not super hopeful about returns here, since these are lower-margin businesses than software companies. But some will get out the door fast enough to make money for early investors."

"Once, while reporting out a story about Uber, I saw lots of Uber reporters and sources were on Telegram at the same time, or had been within five minutes of one another. I experienced a horrifying cocktail of anxiety and agitation. I try to use it sparingly."

"The conversations are uncomfortable, and the discomfort is also an improvement. Few people in power who feel comfortable with the status quo push for systemic changes that level the playing field."

"As a young woman, to speak up and to use your voice and to have a backbone, it’s not always natural. But I think it’s really a powerful tool."

"Joint hosts on the negroes’ invitation would be Nisei, American Indians and other Americans whose physical characteristics make them detectable. I have heard of no such observance during Brotherhood week."

"To visit evacuation [evacuated] neighborhoods and talk with neighbors of the ‘evil, treacherous, fifth column menaces’ who are being summarily moved away, who have been adjudged guilty without any trial at which to claim innocence was to acknowledge an event with all earmarks of a legalized community lynching."

"Ever since the evacuation of Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese along the Pacific Coast was proposed, I have pointed out that the issue was one of race and on that basis affected anyone who was physically distinguishable as ‘colored’"

"“Friends, this is how Hitler made little Nazis: by reaching the children and youth through stories and pictures, he taught them to fear and hate certain groups"

"Americans of Chinese ancestry share in disproportionate measure the apprehension of other non-Whites with regard to the summary treatment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Tightening of residential restrictions against them, for instance, in the neighborhood surrounding San Francisco’s ‘Chinatown’ gives basis for their fears."

"Through friends and newspapers I have maintained a fairly close contact with the evacuee-victims of our lack of confidence in American education and government agencies. On Christmas Eve it was my pleasure to have as a houseguest an old friend who is teaching in the relocation center at Poston. I hasten to suggest that Mr. Leffingwell could find among the Japanese and Nisei internees some real characters whose story, recounted by him in picture, would set before his small readers an example of courage, sensitivity, forgiveness and humility such as would set his cartoon aside from the petty humdrum of its fellows."

"The women of my class were absolutely amazing. They didn’t think of themselves as pioneers in any way and integrated into the community in a great fashion and really contributed so much."

"Number one, after today, every weekday starts with an 8 a.m. class. Number two, everything costs more when you are the one who has to pay for it. And number three, in life, it’s not who you know; it’s whom you know."

"It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world."

"Today the journey is ended, I have worked out the mandates of fate; Naked, alone, undefended, I knock at the Uttermost Gate. Behind is life and its longing, Its trial, its trouble, its sorrow, Beyond is the Infinite Morning Of a day without a tomorrow."

"My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out s and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice."

"... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done."

"As a , I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work."

"and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of , situated on the in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer."

"Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here."

"text at archive.org (See .)"

"The miserable, money loving wretches that these Yankees are: they even have the impudence to paint their advertisements of s and s upon the and the rocks that jut from the ."

"... by far the most active agent in the dissemination of both s and seeds is man. This is the frequent result of intention on his part, in the introduction and cultivation of new grains, fruits, and s, and he works to the same end unconsciously and often to his great detriment by the transportation of the s or seeds of pernicious weeds in the dirt clinging to s and s, and the mixture of impurities with his seeds through ignorance, carelessness, or unavoidable causes. This mode of , however, is purely artificial, and except in the case of a few weeds that have adjusted themselves to the conditions of cultivation, is not correlated with any special adaptations in the plants themselves, many of our most widely distributed weeds, such as the , the , and the , possessing very imperfect natural means of dispersal."

"There was hardly a fence left standing all the way from to . The fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of horses, hogs, and cattle that the invaders, unable either to consume or to carry away with them, had wantonly shot down to starve out the people and prevent them from making their crops. The stench in some places was unbearable; every few hundred yards we had to hold our noses or stop them with the cologne Mrs. Elzey had given us, and it proved a great boon. The dwellings that were standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the and packing-screw, while here and there, lone chimney-stacks, " 's Sentinels," told of homes laid in ashes."

"A very remarkable development of s takes place in the "" of Mexico and Florida, which begins life as a small , from seeds dropped by birds on the boughs or trunks of trees. When it gets well started, the young plant sends down enormous aërial roots, which find their way to the ground, and in time so completely envelop the host that it is literally strangled to death ... When this support is removed, the sheathing roots take its place and becomes to all intents and purposes the stem of the fig tree, which now leads an independent life."

"America the beautiful, Let me sing of thee; Burger King and Dairy Queen From sea to shining sea."

"Many aspects of her private life continue to remain a mystery, including whether or not she married and had children. The origins of her unusual first name also remain unknown."

"Congresswoman Bentley worked with tenacity, energy, and passion on behalf of her constituents, making her a rare breed in politics and a role model to public servants across Maryland."