Quotes by Editors - Page 4

Art cannot save anybody from anything.

Agency in fiction has to exist in the context of the worldview. Otherwise agency is not just meaningless or unconvincing, it is often laughable. Unfortunately, agency is often thoughtlessly given to characters who would not have it in reality. p.189

There is a danger in exposing yourself to too much vapid art. It can weaken your judgment and erode your sensibilities, until the time comes when you see things that are merely passable, and somehow think that they’re good.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere.Try to commit an act of writingand they will jump overboard to get away.

I drink to make other people interesting.

The kiss was so soft she couldn’t believe this was the same bad boy who’d said such things to her with that mouth.

The fact is, inner peace isn't something that comes when you finally paint the whole house a nice shade of cream and start drinking herbal tea. Inner peace is something that is shaped by the wisdom that 'this too shall pass' and is fired in the kiln of self-knowledge...

We slid along water reds and greens, the changing lights captured in the canvas of wet tar.

How could none of them comprehend the beauty of a human soul,shining in heaven for eternity? Where it would be whole again, as they all had been once in times past?

We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done.

One of my biggest complaints about adulthood is that it's difficult to simply hang out with friends

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future.As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.

My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

He remembered hearing Karl tell James once that it was hard for people to ever know what they really looked like. Reflections in mirrors weren’t accurate, Karl said, because when you stared at yourself in a mirror, you subconsciously composed your face in a way that wasn’t your natural expression.Marvin wondered it that was true when you were with strangers too. Maybe you only looked like your true self with the people you loved. And maybe that was a face you yourself hardly ever got to see…

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale murmured.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the universe ... a thinking animal ... and I'm trying to see my way clear through this morass.

Friends are like a pleasant park where you wish to go while you may enjoy the flowers you may not eat them.

The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection.

When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.

I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.

Arrogance pedantry and dogmatism are the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.

He hadn't "abused" alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen.

The Need to Read"Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small.

To appreciate how income taxation reduces prosperity form what it could be, imagine a 100 percent tax on incomes. We wouldn't expect much prosperity in such a society. People would have no incentive to earn money. They would devote resources to hiding the little they did earn. No investments would be made. No savings would exist to increase living standards. People's activities would be grossly influenced by the tax. If we lower the rate from 100 percent, the principle does not change. . . If you want less of something, tax it.

I made a discovery. It was cold enough to make my eyes water, and I found out that If I kept them almost closed, the moisture diffused the lights, so that everything - the Moon, the stars, the street lamp - seemed to have halos and points of scattered light around it. The snow-banks seemed to glitter like a sea of spun sugar, and all the stars were woven together by a lace of incandescence, so that I was walking through a Universe so wild, so wonderful that my heart nearly broke with its beauty."For years, I carried that time and place in mind. It's still there. But the thing is, the Universe didn't make it. I did. I saw it, but I saw it because I made myself see it. I took the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the Earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes, and I made a wonderland. No one else has ever been able to see it. No one else has ever been able to go there. Not even I can ever return to it physically, it lies thirty-eight years in the past, in the eye-level perspective of a child, its stereoscopic accuracy based on the separation between the eyes of a child. In only one place does it actually exist. In my mind Elizabeth - in my life."But I will die, and where will it be, then?"Elizabeth looked up at him. "In mind mind a little? Along with the rest of you?"Hawks looked at her. He reached out and, bending forward as tenderly as a child receiving a snowflake to hold, gently enclosed her in his arms. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," he said. "I never realized that. I never realized what you were letting me do.""I love you.

I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.

Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.

When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD!' 'Dead!' cried his hearers. 'Dead!' answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; 'dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall!''Go on,' whispered the others, holding their breath.The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. ("The Dead Man's Story

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.

No trouble ever got fixed late at night," he said. "Midnight is for regrets.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up.He called it his second smile.

When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.

There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

Forcing girls to be ashamed for doing the things that come natural to them — it's a ridiculous double standard, and we should all, frankly, tell anyone who judges us to screw off.

...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.

His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.

We are plagued by a corrupt polity which promotes unlawful and/or immoral behaviour. Public interest has no practical significance in everyday behaviour among the ruling factions. The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Once upon a time there was an empress, trapped as a ghost in the ruins of a jewelled palace, cursed to find another soul to take her place. At least, that's what the empress heard. But, as it turned out, stories can have any ending you like.

If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having. The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk - remote, but possible - of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn't enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his.

And this is how I come face to face with my selfishness, because I don't know if I can enjoy this goldfish without knowing that he loves me, or if not loves me, then at least depends on me, i.e., swims up to my fingers greedily when I fill them with salty-smelling rainbow-colored flakes, and wiggle them over his head.And this is disturbing to realize, that I have such difficulty enjoying anything that doesn't know I exist. Especially when I stop and think how big the world is, the world that is not even Japan or India, the world that is the room next door.

There she stood. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Her face was pale, almost snow-white. She probably hadn't slept, either. She was still wearing the same dress. Her hair looked like a bomb had gone off. She was beautiful.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

I have said: "Blow out the lamp! Day is here!" And you keep saying: "Give me a lamp so I can find the day.

Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.

If I could sum up my poetry in a few well-chosen words, the result might be a poem. Several years ago, when I was asked to say something on this topic, I came up with the notion that for me the making of poems is both a commemoration (a moment captured) and an evocation (the archaeologist manqué side of me digging into something buried and bringing it to light). But I also said that I find the processes that bring poems into being mysterious, and I wouldn't really wish to know them; the thread that links the first unwilled impulse to the object I acknowledge as the completed poem is a tenuous one, easily broken. If I knew the answers to these riddles, I would write more poems, and better ones. "Simple Poem" is as close as I can get to a credo':Simple PoemI shall make it simple so you understand.Making it simple will make it clear for me.When you have read it, take me by the handAs children do, loving simplicity.This is the simple poem I have made.Tell me you understand. But when you doDon't ask me in return if I have saidAll that I meant, or whether it is true.

June’s clients did not have the patience to deal with problems or the personal courage and energy to find solutions on their own. What they did have was an almost endless supply of capital. With that capital, June’s clients could hire people to solve any problem with minimal effort. That is what June did; she solved problems by the process of elimination.