Words matter. These are the best Janine di Giovanni Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Nonviolence worked in Serbia, and it can work in other countries seeking their freedom.
I have never been embedded with the American army or, you know, with the big war machine.
Little changes can start to make a difference in the world.
Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don’t wait too long to have children.
Lake Como has always been a magnet for the elite.
Even as a small child, I wondered why the Dominican nuns who educated me were subservient to the Jesuit priests who educated my brothers.
Paris certainly needs to promote itself. Although still the most visited city in the world, it has fallen behind London and Berlin in terms of cool.
Africa is a very dangerous place.
During war time, when people were injured, I was really frustrated I did not become a doctor. It’s painful not being able to save people, witnessing their pain.
In a very straightforward way, I am a terrible reporter. I’m not someone who can go into a story and not get involved.
It’s hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.
I never set out to be a journalist. I wanted to be a humanitarian doctor like Albert Schweitzer, working in Africa.
There is a painful joke that Europeans often tell of their Gallic neighbors: God created France, the most beautiful country in the world with so much good in it, and ended up feeling guilty about it. He had to do something to make it fair. And so, he created the French people.
Every time the Catholic Church takes one step forward, it seems to take one giant step back.
When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.
For the first five years of Luca’s life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there’s a danger of suffocating your kids, too.
It’s always disappointing to come across phony do-gooders. And it’s easy to scoff at celebrities working in war zones.
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.
No one lives on credit in France because banks don’t allow overdrafts and zero percent credit cards do not exist.
In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.
When the body breaks down, it does not all go at once; it goes piece by piece.
Stockholm is surely an urban planner’s dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.
It can’t be bad having a mother who is fulfilled by her work.
Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.
When I did a year-long study in 2005 of European countries integrating Muslims into their cultures, France came in the lowest of the rank. Sweden was not far behind, though, which is worrying, as racism in France is much closer to the bone.
In the aftermath of any war or genocide, healing and reconciliation are ultimate aspirations.
There are people who are seekers and people who aren’t.
Sibling rivalry was, and still is to this day, rampant in my family. We were all competing for my parents’ divided attention.
The pope is an intelligent man and realizes that time marches on. He says the Church has a long way to go in developing a real strategy that integrates women – but clearly he is baffled as to how to do it.
I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible – bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.
The fact is, feminism is not what it used to be.
To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It’s not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It’s always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.
In Pakistan, the right to go to school is not a given. In the more rural areas, a girl is born, married off as early as 9 years old, and basically lives life under the control of men.