Charles M. Blow Quotes

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

It would only be in the cold gaze of hindsight that I would be able to comprehend that while in flight from pain, I became an agent of it.

Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.

A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it's really hard to catch.

I know that life, I've done all those things, and I can still tell you that just being you is perfectly fine.

My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.

There was no hierarchy of humanity.... And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them- these things came into the world with me.

One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.

One doesn't have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.

While the word 'bisexual' was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.

This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn't lost, that their destiny is victory.

America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

I had an insanely long commute - New York to D.C. - when I worked at 'National Geographic.' I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn't until later that I realized that I was writing a book.

There are no 'come shoot me' clothes.

But they were different. Weary, not sweet. The skin above Jed's eyes fell soft, releasing the worries before they could stick.

I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.

There can be moments in your life where you may feel attracted to someone depending on circumstance, depending on the person of one gender or another, and sometimes where that is less of an influence in your life.

It has been my experience that the "hardest" people in the world are actually the most fragile and the most soft-spoken are the strongest ...

The internet is ruthless. And people are very, very happy to let you know when they don't like something.

I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two of them, lost in love, and the preacher taking a break from working on a house.

I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture - particularly in black male culture - and to help people to see that there's room enough for everyone.

I was always a relatively quiet and introspective kid.

Voter apathy is a civic abdication.

For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable - a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one - or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen.

I had set about trying to make myself more polished than a country boy would be.

Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.

Equality must be won - by every generation - because it will never be freely granted.

We need to see people other than ourselves in order to empathize. If we don't live around others we do ourselves and our society damage because our ability to relate becomes impaired. It's easy to demonize, or simply dismiss, people you don't know or see...It's nearly impossible to commiserate with the unseen and unknown.

Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate.

I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.

I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.

You don't become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference.

America is not static. America is striving. And sometimes, America requires critique. Jingoism is an avoidance of realism. You can simultaneously love and be disappointed in the object of your love, wanting it to be better than it is. In fact, that is a measure of love. Honest critique is a pillar of patriotism.

Boys hijacked by hormones don't really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away.

You don't have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.

Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.

but blaming him for the whole of the difference in my peculiar sexual identity, while convenient, was most likely not completely accurate. Abusers don't necessarily make children different in that way, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting that kind of difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself, articulate it, and accept it. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.

Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II

I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.

But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being wiling to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.

The not-doing spoke volumes.

A heart still works even when it's broken

The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.

We all have the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it

All identity labels are umbrella terms to some degree, but this term 'bisexual' is not only serviceable, but it is sufficient. And yes, it brings together a bunch of people who are maybe shades different from one another. And maybe that's the beauty of labels: that they force you to be with other people and see the difference.

I was afraid that men like that could see the hole in me, a thing I dared not admit even to myself: that I had an aching need to be chosen, to be seen

The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one. My family had gathered at Papa Joe's house because Mam' Grace was slipping away, only I didn't register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.