Quotes by Editors - Page 2

You're the one taking all the romance out of this," he said. "It's supposed to go, 'that was so brave, how you stood up for your sister like that!' 'Oh, that, what, no, it's what any dragon would do.' 'No, no - you're special. I can tell.' 'Not as special as you. There's a magic about you I've never found in any other dragon!' 'Why - why do I feel as though I've known you forever?' 'Because you have...and you will.' Fireworks! True love and happiness for the rest of our lives!
Tui T. Sutherland
The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.
Frank Herbert
Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.
Richard Appignanesi
In the bazaar today I noticed a shopkeeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight - but there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledge resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it, and got to his feet - and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilising this huge football of tissue as a book-rest.
J.R. Ackerley
The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth.
Frank Herbert
Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.
Russell Blackford
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
In England I would rather be a man a horse a dog or a woman in that order. In America I think the order would be reversed.
Bruce Gould
Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature.
Franz Rottensteiner
Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.
Rob Bignell
But simple as the Sign of the Cross is, it carries a brave weight: it names the Trinity, celebrates the Creator, and brings home all the power of faith to the brush of fingers on skin and bone and belly. So do we, sometimes well and sometimes ill, labor to bring home our belief in God's love to the stuff of our daily lives, the skin and bone of this world — and the Sign of the Cross helps us to remember that we have a Companion on the road.
Brian Doyle
What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.
Frank Herbert
They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.
Frederik Pohl
If government played by the same rules as the rest of us, it would cease to be government.
Sheldon Richman
Until you get to know them in person, anyone you correspond with online remains a stranger.
Michael Miller
Yeah, the whole family knows. It's no big deal. One night at dinner I said, 'Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.' It was easier for her to understand that way.
Holly Black
I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart's desires.
Zinzi Clemmons
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure which is - try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.
Brian Doyle
Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession
Alexandra Johnson
Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!
Ray Russell
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Cyril Connolly
The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.
William McPherson
What the eyes had seen could not be erased.
Frank Herbert
The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year.
Jeff Deck
When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.
Ruth Reichl
What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.
Allison K. Williams
Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody.
William Zinsser
What the world neglects, the Lord accepts.
Deborah Brodie
It is my belief that with two such men in the household and no way to meet others, Emily (Bronte)had to make Heathcliff up out of thin air! And what a fine job she did. Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.
Mary Ann Shaffer
There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are.
Sally Brampton
Love does that. It makes you feel infinite and invincible, like the whole world is open to you, anything is achievable, and each day will be filled with wonder. Maybe it’s the act of opening yourself up, letting someone else in— or maybe it’s the act of caring so deeply about another person that it expands your heart. I’ve heard so many people say some version of I never knew how much I could love another human being until . . . And after the until is usually something like my niece was born or I gave birth to a child or I adopted a baby. I never knew how much I could love another human being until I met you, Gabe.I’ll never forget that.
Jill Santopolo
When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you've written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called "They Walk Alone." "Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if," it seemed to say.
Wolcott Gibbs
Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them;---but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time. [About F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Maxwell Perkins
please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Holly Black
Let pressure pass over and through you. That way you can't be harmed by it.
Brian Herbert
I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …
Hazel Butler
Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms.
Holly Black
Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!
Will Schwalbe
There is a warin your nameI have martyred yousold you to freedomoh, Freedom
Bänoo Zan
He let out a hiss of pain,then smiled that crooked, sheepish smile he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. "Sorry. I-I didn't mean to. I just- I've been lying here for hours, thinking about blood.
Holly Black
Her fingers traced his stomach, trying to remember this is real, this is real with each strike of her heart.
Rebecca Brooks
One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one's innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.("The Tower")
Mark Samuels
Show me a person who is not an extremist about some things who is a "middle-of-the-roader" in everything and I will show you someone who is insecure.
G. Aiken Taylor
We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.
Holly Black
I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Hiking is sort of like strip poker: by the end, all the participants are hot, sweaty, and nearly naked, and the winner is the person who wore the most layers.
Winona Dimeo-Ediger
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
Frank Herbert
A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail grow indispensable.
Cyril Connolly
Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.
Richard Seaver
Verlange. The process feels like crossing a border on a one-way ticket, from a state of innocence, to one of irreconcilable knowledge. You are in a new country. But no one wants to live here. The visas are assigned by some obscure system nobody can comprehend.
Karina Szczurek
His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
William Maxwell
He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
Frank Herbert
Even if a farmer intends to loaf he gets up in time to get an early start.
Edgar Watson Howe
There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated secretary of state will have to pay.
Jack Shafer
I really think I'd be better at, like, advanced napping techniques.
Tui T. Sutherland
We labor under so many illusions about ourselves until we're stripped bare. Being infected, being a vampire, it's always you. Maybe it's more you than ever before. You, distilled. You, boiled down like a sauce. But it's you as you always were, deep down inside.
Holly Black
Maturity turns out to be a question you can never answer with confidence, despite advanced age and wage.
Brian Doyle