Quotes by Editors - Page 6

The purpose of teachers should be to add to the sum of human knowers rather than the sum of human knowledge.
Stuart Sherman
One thing the Bible does not do: it does not denigrate the mind. The Bible is not anti-intellectual. Rather it gives the reason why all of us know what we know, why we can think with some degree of accuracy, and why we fail to think with complete accuracy.
James W. Sire
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.
Edgar Watson Howe
News is the first rough draft of history.
Benjamin Bradlee
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! As far as I am able to judge, it was this that lay behind that distinctive combination of an almost supreme intellectual and 'phantastic' maturity, laced with moral energy, on the one hand, with...a certain psychic or spiritual immaturity on the other
Jocelyn Gibb
[Discipline i]t’s the ability to overcome the urge to grab the bright and shiny and interesting to finish what you’ve started.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
Frank Herbert
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure: try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
Judy shook her head when she saw me the next day, dressed in the same clothes I had worn to work the day before. “We used to call that the walk of shame,” she said.
Marcy Dermansky
When we buy books we're fooling ourselves into thinking we buy the time to read them.
Gerard VanDerleun
Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.
Alfred Bester
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Gideon J. (Gideon John) Tucker
I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
Frank Herbert
As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.
Mark Galli
There's got to be more to life than just living," Foyle said to the robot."Then find it for yourself, sir. Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.""Why can't we all move forward together?""Because you're all different. You're not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.""Who leads?""The men who must...driven men, compelled men.""Freak men.""You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.""Thank you very much.""My pleasure, sir.""You've saved the day.""Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot beamed. Then it fizzed, jangled, and collapsed.
Alfred Bester
Never do something for just one reason.
Jeff VanderMeer
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
You do not beg the sun for mercy.-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary
Frank Herbert
If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users.
Christopher Bollen
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
Cyril Connolly
Logic is not a sure enough defense against moral bankruptcy.
Mark Sappenfield
Lo, thou, my Love, art fair;Myself have made thee so;Yea, thou art fair indeed,Wherefore thou shalt not needIn beauty to despair;For I accept thee so,For fair.[excerpt from "Christ to His Spouse"]
William Baldwin
Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.
Frank Herbert
Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.
Brian Francis Slattery
I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
Alberto Manguel
A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.
Frank Herbert
I am so sorry. That we cannot go back to that moment and get you the help you needed, the information you wanted, the hope and love you craved. I am so sorry about what you’re learning now, what you’re seeing, what you’re reliving. Our culture didn’t let you mourn—we pretend you weren’t a parent, that you’re not. What’s hidden is laid bare. Know you’re loved and not judged. I’m so sorry the law let this happen. I’m so sorry we let this happen.
Kathryn Jean Lopez
A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.
Louis Dudek
All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet.
Ford Madox Ford
There are no heroes and there are no villains. There are just opposing points of view. That's all history is...the viciously long battle between world views.
Peter J. Tomasi
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm ... to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly
I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words "the bright day is done and we are for the dark," I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
Mary Ann Shaffer
The Gelaming regarded themselves as a force for good, and in many ways they were, but they were also inexorable and their compassion could often feel like oppression.
Storm Constantine
He who ceases to pray ceases to prosper.
Sir William Gurney Benham
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.
Holly Black
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.
Brian Doyle
Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals a supernatural strength.
Christian Wiman
Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish.
Terri Windling
Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears as little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog.
Zinzi Clemmons
Laughter puts your brain your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.
Max Eastman
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
Anne Fadiman
Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.
Ruth Reichl
Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes.
Frank Herbert
If a man has money it is usually a sign too that he knows how to take care of it don't imagine his money is easy to get simply because he has plenty of it.
Edgar Watson Howe
Fame clearly breeds a false sense of security.
Eric Reynolds
She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.
Holly Black
We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.
Thomas Curtis Clark
I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.
Frederik Pohl
The Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.
Mark Galli
She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.
Will Schwalbe
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Frank Herbert
Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.
T.E.D. Klein
Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.
William Kristol
The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.
Philip Zaleski
Sometimes there’s someone who makes you feel so at home that you flourish.
Marnie Woodrow
For many people, depression is an abrupt change in an otherwise full and happy life. It emerges suddenly and devastates by its very strangeness and pathology.
Nell Casey
She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying.
Holly Black
Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.
Holbrook Jackson