Quotes by Editors - Page 34

But you want to know about the influence of books on my life, and as I’ve said, there was only one. Seneca. Do you know who he was? He was a Roman philosopher who wrote letters to imaginary friendstelling them how to behave for the rest of their lives.. Maybe that sounds dull, but the letters aren’t – they’re witty. I think you learn more if you’re laughing at the same time.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Diplomacy is the delicate weapon of the civilized warrior."- Hun, A. T.
Robert Lynn Asprin
We're all just wandering around with our fingers crossed, hoping we'll meet someone who will make our lostness a little less lonely.
Alanna Rusnak
How did it die?" he asked."Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires."He looked at me like I was senile."Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough.
Jonathan Messinger
Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.
Frank Herbert
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
Sally Brampton
The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.
Hazel Butler
And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.
Frank Herbert
The hardest thing about being wanted was the hardest thing about wanting—wanting badly enough that it gave you stomachache, wanting in a way that was partly about kissing and partly about swallowing whole, the way a snake gulps down a mouse or the Big Bad Wolf gulps down Red Riding Hood—wanting turned someone you felt like you knew into a stranger. Whether that person was your brother’s best friend or a sleeping prince in a glass prison or a girl who kissed you at a party, the moment you wanted more than just touching your mouth to theirs they became terrifying and you became terrified.
Holly Black
He glared at Lucian in the manner of birds, first peering through one eye and then turning his head to peer through the other, apparently finding both views equally loathsome.
Rachel Swirsky
You have a nicety of awareness of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip.
Frank Herbert
Less is more.
William Zinsser
Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of her honor.
Noah Webster
Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.
Brian Doyle
The Dispatcher had played with his phones, calling from one to the other. Then he put them all down and announced that he had them on "hold," a curious expression since it was the first time in half an hour he hadn't been holding one.
Robert Lynn Asprin
This is what they mean by epiphanies. I am almost thinking in exclamation points.
Claire Hennessy
The truth is not in the commercial media because the truth is a dagger pointed at its heart, which is its pocketbook.
George Seldes
Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.
Frank Herbert
...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....
The New York Times
We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?
Frank Herbert
It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, ‘maturity,’ suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body.
Christian Wiman
Money said, "I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.
Frank Herbert
An ever-growing, ever-constant relationship with God makes us certain of what we believe and enables us to run with endurance.
Katy Kauffman
When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.
Wendy Lesser
Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.
Brian Doyle
That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
Jeff VanderMeer
I thought you were her knight, but you have become only her woodsman--taking little girls into the forest to cut out their hearts.
Holly Black
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
Arnold Edinborough
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. -Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.
Frank Herbert
We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. "No right on red" is a rule. "Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly" is an observation.
Howard Mittelmark
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
Frank Herbert
Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be
Alberto Manguel
But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.
Ben Bradlee
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
I think it's a response to terrorism. From the time we're little girls, we're taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We're terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can't tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to wary of them all. We're told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn't that a form of terrorism?
Sarai Walker
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
Alberto Manguel
Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.
Andy Miller
Now,' cried the fiend, 'follow me! You must understand that I cannot get out by the great gate - the porter will not suffer that. Once here, there is no retreat. Follow me, therefore: we will just go to your house, where you shall dress yourself; for you can hardly go to a ball in your present costume - especially as it is not a bal masque. Mind and wrap yourself well up in your winding-sheet, for the nights are cold, and you may feel unpleasantly touched by it.'As he said this, Satan laughed malignantly; and I continued silently to walk after him.'I am sure,' continued he, 'that, in spite of the service I am doing you, you do not yet like me. You are always thus, you men - ungrateful to your friends. Not that I blame ingratitude; it is a vice upon which I pride myself, since I invented it myself; and I must say, that it is one most in vogue. But I do wish to see you a little more merry - it is the only thing I ask of you.'I answered not, but still followed my guide, white as a statue, and as cold. I was silent; but, at the pauses in the fiend's voice, I could hear my teeth chatter against each other, and my bones rattle in my body. ("The Dead Man's Story")
James Hain Friswell
I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.
Wendy McClure
Men love because they are afraid of themselves afraid of the loneliness that lives in them and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.
V. F. Calverton
Goals that are not frightening are not worth having.
Tina Brown
In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.
Marge Kennedy
Don't know. Don't care. I'm hopping on a bus and going until I can't go any farther. Until I find a place that feels like home.'He's quiet for a long time. 'How will you know what home feels like?'It hangs in the air between us, as frozen as our breaths. I don't have an answer.
Holly Black
God's 'permission' of evil so multiplied is not simply to be accounted for by his respecting our free will. He takes the harms we mutually inflict and overrules them for our good.
Jocelyn Gibb
Pages burnt, memories buried, I wakeor think I'm awake. Or dreaming still?
Yong Shu Hoong
Don't be afraid of Pain. Pain only comes down to a certain point... beyond that, it can't reach you and the love you have inside.
Eeva Lancaster
A torch-light procession marching down your throat.
John L. O'Sullivan
Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?
Frank Herbert
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
Wendy Priesnitz
He and the second wife must have made a very close, self-contained unit--two people moving through life as if in a thinly membraned bubble, venturing out separately for practical purposes but neither of them whole unless they were together. People who didn't need many friends or outside activities, who found complete fulfillment in each other.
Bill Pronzini
Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.
E. V. Lucas
We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.
Alberto Manguel
Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.
Scott Kaelen
Simplicity is the most difficult of all concepts.
Brian Herbert
Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.
Chris Pavone
If your career doesn’t work out, write a book about it.
Marcy Sheiner
Have confidence in God's character, love, and power.
Katy Kauffman
Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.
Philip Zaleski
Once inside I stripped off my clothes and showered. Refreshed, I pick up my phone and type. ME: I want you. Come over now if you feel the same way.I held my breath as a I waited for a response but after several minutes none came. Maybe he wasn't going to come.
Gwendolyn Grace