Quotes by Editors - Page 10

And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.
Willie Morris
Was the whole matter of aptitudes a myth – a copout used by people like me to avoid subjects that would force us to think inTherefore threatening ways?
William Zinsser
For every guy who loves being a dad, there’s another who realizes too late that he’s created something his wife loves more than him.
Mark R. Brand
What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.
Jocelyn Gibb
Hollow slogans like "Making your country great again" only lead to one result, collapse.
Paul Levitz
What man can imagine he may one day achieve.
Nancy Hale
She tastes like every dark thought I've ever had.
Holly Black
Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.
Sally Brampton
Your father used to say "Never give away your work. People don't value what they don't have to pay for."
Nancy Hale
Talking of snakes, Mrs. Montgomery told me that once she nearly stood upon a krait - one of the most venomous snakes in India. She has been very ill at the time, suffering from acute facial neuralgia, 'so that I didn't care if I trod on fifty kraits. I was quite stupid with pain, and was going back in the evening to my bungalow, preceded by a servant who was carrying a lamp. Suddenly he stopped and said "Krait, Mem-sahib!" - but I was far too ill to notice what he was saying, and went straight on, and the krait was lying right in the middle of the path! The servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India - he touched me! - he put hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course if he hadn't done that I should have undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn't like it all the same same, and got rid of him soon after.
J.R. Ackerley
When you made tons of money, had a beautiful wife and three adorable kids-when you were the envy of your community and coworkers-you had no right to behave badly. Stop whining, chin up, take Prozac, and pretend your pain isn't ravaging your soul.
C.S. Lakin
With today’s technology, social attitudes and appetite for self-actualisation, we’d ideally look upon our work with a sense of pride, involvement and accomplishment. But we’re rarely given the chance. Instead, we pretend to love our jobs with an almost idiotic zeal, while being secretly exhausted and insulted by them.
Robert Wringham
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man
George Jean Nathan
Moving on was going to require leaving the woods and getting a friend set that didn’t have gray hairs, hip replacements and a few false teeth.
Rebecca Brooks
The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.
Frank Herbert
The sky grows dark over the city as Janey tells me her story. Teh beast was supposed to help their community. Something that would look good in a brochure, I suppose. But instead, it cut loose, took out in to the Williamsburg night. Janey and the kids went after it , and when they finally caught up what does it do? The thing ate a hipster.
Daniel José Older
Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.
Franz Rottensteiner
...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192
Jeff VanderMeer
Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.
Anne Fadiman
It's not an easy thing to tell a true story.
Allen Morris Jones
Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.
Frank Herbert
You cannot slay the illusion of the victim until you face it and call it truth
Deborah Brodie
Wetenschap is wat wetenschappers doen - Science is what scientists do.
Dennis Flanagan
History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
Holbrook Jackson
Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.
Maxwell Perkins
She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.
T.E.D. Klein
The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's.
Wendy McClure
Bland as a Jesuit sober as a hymn.
William Ernest Henley
The lies we tell about ourselves may be more revealing than the truths we incautiously reveal.
James Edwin Gunn
To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.
X.J. Kennedy
The same good folk who would burn me for a psychal now paid me to use my cursed gramarye to guard their sheep.
Hazel Butler
Maybe before you start flirting with boys and kissing boys and trying to date boys, you should know who you are and where you stand.
Jill Santopolo
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.
Rob Bignell
If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.
Terry Carr
The city gives even to children a sophisticated look that baffles the casual psychologist.
Honoré Willsie Morrow
Ideas are powerful things requiring not a studious contemplation but an action even if it is only an inner action.
Midge Dector
It is the illusion of magic and the magic of illusion that we are primarily interested in- not the privy tricks or the key to the secrets themselves. We seek the bafflement, the contradictions, the amusements, and the innumerable emotions that ripple uneasily through the audience. It is not knowledge we are after, but mystery and disguises. We want to gaze at the impossible. We are hungry for surprises, astonishment. In short, we are looking for a true story, but one impossible to explain in all its complexity. When we discover that story, we shall have found- magic.
Edward Claflin
My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.
Rob Bignell
In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.
Asti Hustvedt
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
...awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement.
Brian Doyle
Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
Russell Lynes
Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.
Philip Zaleski
As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.
Philip Zaleski
Perhaps the only happily ever after is to survive to tell the story
Kat Howard
One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul.
Herbert S. Gaskill
It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.
Hazel Butler
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.
Holly Black
...I was not prepared for the feel of the noodles in my mouth, or the purity of the taste. I had been in Japan for almost a month, but I had never experiences anything like this. The noodles quivered as if they were alive, and leapt into my mouth where they vibrated as if playing inaudible music.
Ruth Reichl
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.
Billie Sue Mosiman
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
Frederik Pohl
I want to leave all my friends and the sunlight for a small, rainy town.
The Harvard Lampoon
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
Frank Herbert
To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. Disney's well–known film version of the story, released in 1937, was ostensibly based on the German tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Originally titled "Snow–drop" and published in Kinder–und Hausmarchen in 1812, the Grimms' "Snow White" is a darker, chillier story than the musical Disney cartoon, yet it too had been cleaned up for publication, edited to emphasize the good Protestant values held by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. (...) Variants of Snow White were popular around the world long before the Grimms claimed it for Germany, but their version of the story (along with Walt Disney's) is the one that most people know today. Elements from the story can be traced back to the oldest oral tales of antiquity, but the earliest known written version was published in Italy in 1634.
Terri Windling
It was different than all the rest because I say it was. I felt it was.
Katie Heaney
By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.
Rob Bignell
It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.
Charles Péguy
Souls were webs of light that contained the essence of a human's life. Memories and loves, children and families. Every moment of life, pressing in
Carolyn Turgeon
motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.
Frank Herbert