Quotes by Editors - Page 38

Farmers worry only during the growing season but town people worry all the time.
Edgar Watson Howe
When I am idle and shiftless my affairs become confused when I work I get results ... not great results but enough to encourage me.
Edgar Watson Howe
A dog wags its tail with its heart.
Martin Buxbaum
Ish #109 "If MapQuest says make a right, go straight. You'll get there quicker.
Regina Griffin
What an author doesn't know could fill a book.
Holly Black
I can't stop thinking about dying the way humans do it. Imagine! If at any moment, you could just stop existing. How different everything would be.." They don't stop existing Lenia said...They have souls that live forever. Even knowing that, they fight so hard to stay alive. I think it's so beautiful. Imagine: being that fragile, that permanent.
Carolyn Turgeon
Efficiency was a higher priority than imagination.
Adam Christopher
If Blake thought she was going to be some meek, mealy-mouthedpushover grateful for his dick and his non-apologies, he obviously didn’t know what it took to make a room full of tenth graders pay attention.
Rebecca Brooks
Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it's not only historical, it's a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you'll hear.
Kevin Sampsell editor "Shanghaied" by Gigi Little
The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.
Frank Herbert
Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?
Frank Herbert
We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.
Frank Herbert
Riley asked himself why he had ever considered space travel romantic. “Because you are a romantic,” his pedia said.
James Edwin Gunn
We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
Ekaterina Sedia
Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
Howard Mittelmark
No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.
Art Spiegelman
Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
Frank Herbert
Dogs laugh but they laugh with their tails.
Max Eastman
She was beautiful, but her youth, the very awkwardness of her age, prevented her from flaunting it.
Richard J. O'Brien
There are stories in the air as thick as birds around me, he would say. I will save those stories from starving he would say. I have a great hunger for stories, he would say.
Brian Doyle
Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.
Charles Platt
You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.
Christian Wiman
I am obviously not a patient person.
Katie Heaney
Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Frank Herbert
Every book I've read appears in my writing.
Rob Bignell
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
Each day Marda gets closer. The sub circles coral reefs off the coasts, where mermaids are said to like the colors of the schools of fishes, and train them to swim around their necks like jewelry or live behind their ears, beneath their long hair. Sometimes mermaids like shallow places, but mostly they like the dark and the beautiful, uncharted, abandoned, soulless parts of the undiscovered world.
Holly Walrath
Some people grow older and more cynical. Some people become just the opposite. Life hurts without hope, and cynicism, once a luxury, becomes unaffordable.
William Norwich
God gives every bird its food but he does not throw it into the nest.
Josiah G. Holland
Heralds of the gospel have been needed in every generation. This generation is no different.
Katy Kauffman
You know you're having a bad week when you call 911, the paramedics come to your house, and one of them notices you've rearranged your furniture.
Cherie Kephart
The charming king of Arilland had fallen in love at first sight. There was no question he would soon take this beautiful stranger as his bride.Fate had brought them together. Destiny. It was intoxicating.
Alethea Kontis
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
Wendy Lesser
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.
Kevin Kelly
Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life and from their hands it comes in fair articulate forms to bless the world.
Josiah Gilbert Holland
To say "He was a young fool, and now he's an old fool" is to make a distinction without a difference.
Gary Inbinder
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Having an achievement mindset is your competitive advantage
Maxine Phillips
The most procession that ever comes to a man in this world is a women's heart.
Josiah G Holland AKA Timothy Titcomb
After a debauch of thundershower the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.
Philip Zaleski
An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.
The Economist
What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as 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
People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can't do.
Edgar Watson Howe
Now that I think about it, maybe he is a werewolf. I can picture him lunging over the moors in hot pursuit of his prey, and I'm certain that he wouldn't think twice about eating an innocent bystander. I'll watch him closely at the next full moon. He's asked me to go dancing tomorrow--perhaps I should wear a high collar. Oh, that's vampires, isn't it? I think I am a little giddy. (After meeting Mr. Markham V. Reynolds, Jr.)
Mary Ann Shaffer
Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)
John Clute
The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.
Martin Greenburg
I do not fully understand the way of human beings. They are a curious and remarkable tribe altogether. They are capable of anything. I know that much. They are a constant surprise to me. They are a constant surprise to themselves also. They appear to live in a state of constant amazement. This makes them refreshing and infuriating. But there is a greatness about them sometimes. More perhaps than they know. Or a capacity for greatness. More than they know. It’s confusing but I know this to be true. I have learned that much in all these years.
Brian Doyle
A single thought, he considered, could do all sorts of harm. Harm to what, he wasn't sure, but he identified it as harm.
Adam P. Knave
There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.
William George Jordan
These cords that God makes, Reverend Bauxite thought, we stand holding one end while they run taut into the darkness.
Brian Francis Slattery
But to betray her with battalion... That is against decency, against Nature...And for him, Christopher tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here!
Ford Madox Ford
My husband said to me while I was swooning in his arms, 'Why are all the longest dances the draggiest?'I took this to mean that he has not loved me for a very long time. Everything means something, or it does not. I have expressed an opinion. Every effect has a source that is not unfamiliar. It's all so evil.("The Uncanny")
Diane Williams
The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.
Asti Hustvedt
I believe I am becoming pathetic. I'll go further, I believe that I am in love with a flower-growing, wood-carving quarryman/carpenter/pig farmer. In fact, I know I am. Perhaps tomorrow I will become entirely miserable at the thought that he doesn't love me back - may, even, care for Remy- but at this precise moment I am succumbing to euphoria. My head and stomach feel quite odd.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Spirits flitted through the red-and-orange sky like leaves blown on the October wind. They dipped and darted over the brownstones and housing projects, swooped around the towering glass palaces, and dove into the crooked alleyways. Sierra smiled. The world had become so much more alive once she learned to see the dead. For a few moments, she just stood there, let herself be a spectator to the ever unfolding drama of city lights and spirits.
Daniel José Older
Treating feminism like it's a personal accessory that just isn't appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn't made strides for people who still need it.
Andi Zeisler
She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hoping to inhale the odor of a werewolf, a csordásfarkas. As if his scent was a charm. She smelled nothing but hay burned by the afternoon sun.
Jody Shields
Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.
Maxwell Perkins