Correspondents Quotes

“In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The truck takes off again on Jalan 15 Oktober, in a cloud of dust, papers and tatters. A half-naked boy, coming out of nowhere, waves at us as if nothing had happened. For a moment, it almost feels like life could go on, just as it always does. But that’s not the case. There’s no time for life here anymore.”
― Marco Lupis, Il male inutile: Dal Kosovo a Timor Est, dal Chiapas a Bali, le testimonianze di un reporter di guerra

“We are woken gently at three in the morning and told that we need to leave. Guided by the light of the stars rather than the moon, we walk for half an hour before we reach a hut. We can just about make out the presence of three men inside, but it's almost as dark as the balaclavas that hide their faces. In the identikit released by the Mexican government, Marcos was de-scribed as a professor with a degree in philosophy who wrote a thesis on Althusser and did a Master's at Paris-Sorbonne Univer-sity. A voice initially speaking French breaks the silence: “We’ve got twenty minutes. I prefer to speak Spanish if that’s OK. I’m Subcomandante Marcos.”
― Marco Lupis, Interviste del Secolo Breve

“A war is a very serious gig indeed, and not one for which I am prepared, either mentally or pharmaceutically. Journalists who follow such things are another breed, another species altogether, lantern-eyed with long sleepless nights of shelling, their postures permanently altered by the weight of their combat armor. They speak a language all their own, intelligible only to others of their species, and they are a dying breed. Today, bereft of even the tiniest civil disturbance to cover, they have begun to fight each other in bloody hand-to-hand combat, one-on-one, with teeth and fingernails, like psychopathic lemmings bent on the annihilation of their species”
― Dave Hutchinson, Now Wash Your Hands