James Alonzo Bishop (November 21, 1907 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist and author who wrote the bestselling book The Day Lincoln was Shot.
True love is night jasmine, a diamond in darkness, the heartbeat no cardiologist has ever heard. It is the most common of miracles, fashioned of fleecy clouds - a handful of stars tossed into the night sky.
Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.
A golf ball can stop in the fairway, rough, woods, bunker or lake. With five equally likely options, very few balls choose the fairway.
A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.
Scoops of mint ice cream with chips of chocolate cows.
When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?
Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts.
Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.
The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.
Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
Perhaps the best thing which can be said about newspapers in the United States is that they are in chronic disagreement with each other. That is what is meant by a free press.
I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.
A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.
Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.
Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.
Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
A reporter meets interesting people. If he endures, he will get to know princes and presidents, popes and paupers, prostitutes and panderers. And always, in the back of his head, there will be a dozen men and women he will never meet. And always, he will feel the poorer for it.
Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.
At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.