Quotes by Editors - Page 25

You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?

I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.""They tried and failed, all of them?""They tried and died.

We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,committed or endured or suspected; there are worse thingsthan not being able to sleep for thinking about them.It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking inand stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself.

The Australian jewel beetle has sex with beer bottles.The beetles are a light chocolate color with dimples all down their back and dark black legs and heads that peek out from underneath their carapeces. Their bodies are big and long instead of round, and they resemble cicadas more than they do ladybugs. The male Australian jewel beetle is hardwired to like certain aspects about the female jewel beetle. They like females to be big, brown, and shiny. The bottles they make love to are bigger, browner, and shinier than any female could ever hope to be. In Australia, a certain type of bottle called stubbies overstimulates male jewel beetles. In a trash heap filled with bottles, you will often see every single stubby covered in male jewel beetles trying to get it on. The stubbies are what evolutionary psychologists call supernormal releasers. They are superstimuli, better than the real thing. The beetles will mate with these bottles even while being devoured by ants.

Lift your head to me...’ His is the kiss of a timorous lover. Feel his inhuman lips on the throat, the heat of it. The bite, when it comes, is cold. Begin to sink as the blood flows into his mouth; it is almost soothing. No pain. No pain at all. His teeth grind into the muscles; ecstasy and torment. Life, the very being, is flowing out. Unholy nourishment. Holy nourishment. Drained slowly.The trauma of it feels like being torn, but it is no more than suddenly having the ability to experience reality in a different way. Waiting for the end... for what? Cannot foretell. No longer flesh, no longer blood. Soul. Free.

Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

However, as I hope to persuade you, there are some interesting connections between science and magic. They share a belief, as one mathematician put it, that what is visible is merely a superficial reality, not the underlying "real reality." They both have origins in a basic urge to make sense of a hostile world so that we may predict or manipulate it to our own ends.

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

On Friday evening Martin and Mona went to the United Artists Theatre to see a film already being mentioned for the Academy award. It had three stars, ran a hundred and ten minutes, and bored them both to petrifaction. (In brief, the award was in the bag.)The Case of the Seven of Calvary

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed and can't get there is the meanest feeling in the world.

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.

But you have so much in common. You're both from strange little backwater planets. You both have odd powers. You're male and she's female. What more do you need? Believe me, buddy, if I were you, I'd go right up there and ask her if she wants to ride on my rancor.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.

You do not set a high enough value on yourself if you think a man who loves you should not weave you into the fabric of his life with every thread. — Robert Service to Constance MacLean, 1903 (age 28)

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs.My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.

As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.

I do not believe that the deeper problems of living can ever be answered by the process of thought. I believe that life itself teaches us either patience with regard to them or reveals to us possible solutions when our hearts are pressed close against duties and sorrows and experiences of all kinds.

Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed."There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said.

Memories are interesting. Interesting because they are faded yet detailed, pictured yet difficult to decipher, yelling yet mute, beautiful yet dreadful, magical yet logical, and familiar yet new. We listen; we encounter; we observe; we do; we learn; and, we talk. Everything we do or experience becomes our memory. Indeed, memories are interesting.

My Dad is everywhere and he is nowhere. My world tilts on a different axis, orbiting the sun of my own family- but still, I feel his warmth.

It's the story of the City of Women; of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it was destroyed by a reckless and irrevocable act of mercy.

All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

But maybe she should turn the other way while I get dressed. Wouldn't want to ruin her for other men. - Dean

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It’s often employed by liars.

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views--I just didn't think about religion.

When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.

If you want to understand democracy spend less time in the library with Plato and more time in the buses with people.

They were both sad that their love had died, but they agreed that there was nothing they could do about it. They would just have to part.

I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want.

Rockface sheer and imposing, emerges from the sea, reminding us nature makes no allowances.

Early Summer, loveliest season,The world is being colored in.While daylight lasts on the horizon,Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos."Welcome, summer" is what he says.Winter's unimaginable.The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.Summer means the river's shallow,Thirsty horses nose the pools.Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.White bog cotton droops in bloom.Swallows swerve and flicker up.Music starts behind the mountain.There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.The speckled fish jumps; and the strongSwift warrior is up and running.A little, jumpy, chirpy fellowHits the highest note there is;The lark sings out his clear tidings.Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.

He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

What drives abortion bans and restrictions? The belief that women who have sex for pleasure rather than procreation are sluts.

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city’s underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It’s long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel’s length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains?

There are trees that seem to die at the end of autumn. There are also the evergreens.

The God who made all things and has all power, loves us and hears our prayers.

There is a point when facing the unknown stops being a longed-for adventure and becomes a terrifying reality.

Art is art. You can take it or leave it. Liking it or not liking it does not make you a better person, and who you like or dislike results in the same thing.

The Archbishop cradled his right hand in his left. He hung his head in concentration. The goal was meditation, but I've never been quite sure where meditation ends and prayer begins, or where prayer ends and meditation begins. I have heard it said that prayer is when we speak to God, and meditation is when God answers.

Machines can't lie," I said, lying through my circuits.

There was no one to blame but the mighty, ruthless stranger. Thus was complexity reduced to demonology, which is a defining feature of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, or, indeed, any "anti-ism.

Over-excitement and boredom are states of mind which I equally shun.

Every single day an estimated eighteen million men gratuitously waste the future of our country, by needlessly ejaculating one hundred million citizens of our country, which had they been born, would have made us the strongest country on the planet.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty."Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.

Free and fearless courage comes from time spent with Jesus.