Quotes by Editors - Page 29

As the dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad.
Heywood Broun
Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place.
Brian Doyle
Donny recovered herself. “Dude, that was the seventh sign of the apocalypse. I’m so not going to class on the last day of the world.
Gwen Hayes
You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.
Holly Black
there are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea.
Carolyn Turgeon
I should try to pass along the good that has happened to me. That’s my responsibility as being part of this planet.
Jameson Currier
It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they’d been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country
Will Schwalbe
Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.
Clifton Fadiman
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel
A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted."No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die."Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.
Holly Black
I realized that what matters with any innovation is that it actually creates more value for people.
Stuart Crainer
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
Frank Herbert
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
...and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.
Vendela Vida
So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.
Anne Fadiman
It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in witch they it right back to the weaker one and never think of escaping from the whole filthy mess.
Rona Jaffe
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...
Alberto Manguel
Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.
Sally Brampton
Damn! - I'd rather walk into something of my own accord than to be frogmarched into it.""So it says here in the file. James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded. Can be trusted to do anything at all - provided the alternative is worse.""You sound like my father. Did he tell you that?""The Service does not reveal its sources of information.
Eric Frank Russell
The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unattainable – at least in our earthly existence.
Philip Zaleski
The Bookshop has a thousand books,All colors, hues, and tinges,And every cover is a doorThat turns on magic hinges.
Nancy Byrd Turner
Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
William Maxwell
Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.
Thomas Beller
The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
William Zinsser
There is something distinguished about even his failures they sink not trivially but with a certain air of majesty like a great ship its flags flying full of holes.
George Jean Nathan
Beauty was worthIts every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,As darkness covered the garden that is the earth.
Hayden Carruth
Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.
Alfred Bester
The blossoms fall just once each winter, yet in our memories, they fall every day.
David Kudler
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner.
Frank Herbert
Tous mes anciens amours vont me revenir.'- All my old loves will be returned to me
Carolyn Turgeon
And hearts have been broken from harsh words spoken That sorrow can ne'er set right.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
Bravery is the knowledge of the cowardice in the enemy.
Edgar Watson Howe
Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?
Leonid Borodin
There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there's nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witness them, and feel some deep ache that such things arrive, and must be endured, with wordless aching all around.
Brian Doyle
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part on the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.
Frank Herbert
To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs.
Pamela Paul
Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide.
Jocelyn Gibb
Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.
Philip Athans
Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.
Jean Burden
Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn't the same as equality...
Andi Zeisler
You didn't think I really liked you? Do you think I really like you now?"He turned toward her, uncertainty in his face."You did go quite a lot of effort to be having this conversation, but... I don't want to read too much of what I hope into that."Val stretched out beside him, resting her head in the crook of his arm. "What do you hope?"He pulled her close, hands careful not to touch her wounds as they wrapped around her. "I hope that you feel for me as I do for you," he said, his voice like a sigh against her throat.And how is that?" she asked, her lips so close to his jaw that she could taste the salt of his skin when she moved them.You carried my heart in your hands tonight," he said. "But I have felt as if you carried it long before that."She smiled and let her eyes drift closed. They lay there together, under the bridge, city lights burning outside the windows like a sky full of falling stars, as they slid off into sleep
Holly Black
Beauty and grace command the world.
Park Benjamin
He's got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he's not disagreeable about it. He's too sure he's right to bother being disagreeable.
Mary Ann Shaffer
But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.
Anne Fadiman
No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
Brian Herbert
I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
Sally Brampton
And then I met this girl.” He paused, his fingers finding mine in a tight squeeze. “And she made all my dark corners light
Gwen Hayes
One of the most adventurous things left is to go to bed for no one can lay a hand on our dreams.
E. V. Lucas
If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.He will have nothing to live for.
James Edwin Gunn
The Boy looked at him for a long time before responding. “Well, as long as you’re my friend, I’ll never ignore you,” he said with conviction. “I know what it’s like to be invisible to other people.
Mike Resnick
If we are part of nature, then we are synonymous with it at the metaphysical level, every bit as much as the first all-but-inorganic animalcules that ever formed a chain of themselves in the blow hole of a primordial sea vent. There is no magic rod that comes down three hundred thousand years ago and divides our essence from the material world that produced us. This means that we cannot speak in essential terms of nature—neither of its brutality nor of its beauty—and hope to say anything true, if what we say isn’t true of ourselves.The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it’s reversed: What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. As far as Rafinesque was concerned, it was just hard science. That part is mysterious. “She lives her life not as men or birds,” said Rafinesque, “but as a world.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of - hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.
Mary Ann Shaffer
A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil--of people passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices--of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray's rhythmic death--of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work--of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller's court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell--of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold the devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!
Abraham Grace Merritt
When we were little kids, 'friend' wasn't a verb. You didn't 'friend' someone. You had friends. It was only a noun. It didn't multitask. It was a simpler time, Hen.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies!
Francis Pharcellus Church
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
William Zinsser
Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.
Sara Nelson
It's so much more interesting to study a ... damaged world. I find it difficult to learn anything in a place that's too civilized.
Brian Herbert
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Alberto Manguel