Quotes by Editors - Page 5

Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary. -- Margaret Cousins
Margaret Cousins
(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.
Frank Harris
Never concede to evil…. When we concede to evil, even in a small way, we feed it, and it grows stronger.
Dave Wolverton
The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.
Holly Black
All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
And his father has the gall to think I’d seduce a kid who uses Clearasil instead of aftershave!
Elaine Raco Chase
... We would be foolish to say of Miss Moss, for example, that the words female and store owner and tall and thirtyish and kindly an unmarried describe much of real substance about her, isn't that so? A great deal of who she really is are stories we do not know, stories she may or may not share, stories perhaps even she does not know the meaning and shape of quite yet. People are stories aren't they? And their stories keep changing and opening and closing and braiding and weaving and stitching and slamming to a halt and finding new doors and windows through which to tell themselves, isn't that so? Isn't that what happens to you all the time? It used to be when you were little that other people told you stories about yourself and where you came from, but then you begin to tell your own story, and you find that your story keeps changing in thrilling and painful ways and it's never in one place. Maybe each of us is a sort of village with lots of different beings living together under one head of hair, around the river of your pulse, the crossroads of who you were and who you wish to be.
Brian Doyle
As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
Ross Wetzsteon
Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I’ve got to stop this. Stop worrying about the why. Stop forcing what was happening into the realm of impossible. Stop hiding behind excuses. Stop being afraid to step out on faith.
Deatri King-Bey
Few begin with anything like a clear view of what they want to do and the fortune they seek may come in a very different form from that which they have kept in view.
The Independent
Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.
Alberto Manguel
It's the way we deal with what fate hands us that defines who we are.
Lisa Graff
If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.
Charles Péguy
When a stranger on the street makes a sexual comment, he is making a private assessment of me public. And though I’ve never been seriously worried that I would be attacked, it does make me feel unguarded, unprotected. Regardless of his motive, the stranger on the street makes an assumption based on my physique: He presumes I might be receptive to his unpoetic, unsolicited comments. (Would he allow a friend to say “Nice tits” to his mother? His sister? His daughter?) And although I should know better, I, too, equate my body with my soul and the result, at least sometimes, is a deep shame of both. Rape is a thousand times worse: The ultimate theft of self-control, it often leads to a breakdown in the victim’s sense of self-worth. Girls who are molested, for instance, often go on to engage in risky behavior—having intercourse at an early age, not using contraception, smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. This behavior, it seems to me, is at least in part because their self-perception as autonomous, worthy human beings in control of their environment has been taken from them.
Leora Tanenbaum
Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
Ruth Reichl
Was James bipolar?”The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.”I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.”She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.
Hazel Butler
Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?
Ford Madox Ford
Every restaurant is a theater, and the truly great ones allow us to indulge in the fantasy that we are rich and powerful. When restaurants hold up their end of the bargain, they give us the illusion of being surrounded by servants intent on ensuring our happiness and offering extraordinary food. But even modest restaurants offer the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while. Restaurants free us from mundane reality; that is part of their charm. When you walk through the door, you are entering neutral territory where you are free to be whoever you choose for the duration of the meal.
Ruth Reichl
The correspondence testifies to the frailty of human longings, to the process of how something precious can turn fatal, a reality become illusion. We are reminded that love should be cherished when it comes your way, because no matter in what form it arrives, carrying no matter what baggage in its fragile beautiful hands, you should welcome it and protect it from the harshness of this world.
Karina Szczurek
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
Anne Fadiman
I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
B. K. Sandwell
Cats don't think they're owned by anybody. Even behind doors and windows, like amiable Wally, they're free. Always. That may, in fact, be the most important thing about them.
Michael Korda
The wise man's ... friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people evoked as it is by many qualities.
Charles Dudley Warner
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long words that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb. every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.
William Zinsser
Blind cat jumps with faith you should too.
Marcia Meier
We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.
Frank Herbert
We create our own future by our own beliefs, which control our actions. A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction, can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality, including our gods.
Brian Herbert
While it is easy to blame the hand of the abuser, when that hand no longer is raised against you, why do you continue to feel the burn of its touch?
Deborah Brodie
If you knew how cowardly your enemy is you would slap him. Bravery is knowledge of the cowardice in the enemy.
Edgar Watson Howe
But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. 'I'll have no obedience around here!' I said, banging the table. 'Is that clear?''Is it an order?''Yes.
Peter De Vries
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Cyril Connolly
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Péguy
I have no history but the length of my bones.
Robin Skelton
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
Joseph Epstein
Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.
Holly Black
...people would tell you much more than you expected to if you were generically presentable and left silence next to them like a friendly stranger; it was like they were waiting for some friendly silence so they could fill it with words; and words were useful, words were hints and intimations, words were fingers pointed in certain directions, if you listened carefully..
Brian Doyle
This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.
Gilles Néret
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
Rob Bignell
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
Anne Fadiman
In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.
Bill Buford
The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason.
Sari Botton
Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.
Frank Herbert
There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ance
Noah Webster
...it has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else.
Howard Mittelmark
Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura," the Duke said. "I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.
Frank Herbert
Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.
Naveed Saleh
That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?
Peter Washington
The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.
David Ebershoff
The great thing to learn about life is first not to do what you don't want to do and second to do what you do want to do.
Margaret Anderson
Steven dreamed of you the very secondyou died(So the poem goes)and you may have visited himBut I'm pretty sure you don't believein poems
Jon Paul Fiorentino
Humans are almost always lonely.
Frank Herbert
I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
Herbert Bayard Swope
Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.
Shirley Abbott
Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.
M.V. Carey
Americans have a tendency to take much of our long-term economic, technological, medical, and social progress for granted, while assuming problems will only get worse. This is unwarranted.
Rachel DiCarlo Currie
Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.
Hazel Butler
Ish #303 "It's a street food vendor! Stop asking for the health score rating.
Regina Griffin
Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.
Anne Elizabeth Moore