Quote

I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

Peggy Noonan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peggy Noonan
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: August 7
Author
Journalist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Short
Pluck
Emotion
Susceptible
Moving
Fog
Order
Leap
Stills
Attempt
Still
Emotions
Leaps
Kind
Speech
Eulogy
Love
Meaning
Ragged

More quotes by Peggy Noonan

Image
The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping
Peggy Noonan
Image
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator
Peggy Noonan
Image
We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear
Peggy Noonan
Image
At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like That's a busted tire floating by and That's an old shoe?
Peggy Noonan
Image
Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style.
Peggy Noonan
Image
The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.
Peggy Noonan
Image
I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.
Peggy Noonan
Image
The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.
Peggy Noonan
Image
A great speech is literature.
Peggy Noonan
Image
The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.
Peggy Noonan
Image
If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.
Peggy Noonan
Image
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered.
Peggy Noonan
Image
We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Abortion is either OK or it's not.
Peggy Noonan
Image
Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the ask not what you can do... speech, he would answer 'ask not.'
Peggy Noonan
Image
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.
Peggy Noonan