Quotes by Editors - Page 8

The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'Those were the days.(introduction to "The Weird Woman")
Hugh Lamb
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
Then are there no rules at all, Lord?” Moneo's voice conveyed a faint hint of hysteria.Leto smiled to ease the man's tensions. “Perhaps one. Short–term decisions tend to fail in the long–term.
Frank Herbert
I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
Joyce Johnson
That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them.
Leigh Newman
Once someone's hurt you, it's harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn't stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.
Holly Black
When people hear good music it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.
Edgar Watson Howe
It's a real lightning bolt, this Science of Phrenology. I've found out more in the last three days than I knew in my whole life before. Mrs. Guilbert has always been a nasty one, but now I know that she can't help it—she's got a big pit in her Benevolence spot. She fell in the quarry when she was a girl, and my guess is she cracked her Benevolence and was never the same since.
Mary Ann Shaffer
By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead.
Damon Knight
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
The swaggering underemphasis of New England.
Heywood Broun
Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity.
Jocelyn Gibb
What really matters is what you do with what you have.
Shirley Lord
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.
Frank Herbert
Being a child is such a shining gift, yet we don't know how precious it is until it's worn out and gone away.
Storm Constantine
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
Alberto Manguel
I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.p112-13
Brian Doyle
Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.
Roberta Gellis
Plenty of things in the universe are old, my dear. That's like saying Florida is a metaphor for hell because they're both hot - though your grandfather would agree wholeheartedly with that, I suppose.
Sammy Nickalls
Without Bardawulf's pelt about me I felt naked before the crowds, yet I knew what I would invite if folk saw me wearing it. The whispers would become shouts, the shouts accusations, and finally cries of terror, and even if they did not whip me at the post or burn me for my gramarye, the fear would swell within their minds. Their thoughts would focus on naught but me. And I would find myself at the mercy of an onslaught of geiste from which even Lynae would be unable to defend me.
Hazel Butler
The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.
Brian Herbert
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.
Frank Herbert
But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.
Frank Herbert
Which is when I decided I would never love anyone again because you just felt like an idiot when you put love out there and it didn't come back your way.
Karen Tayleur
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
Alberto Manguel
(Remember you always have the option of taking to the sea.)
Mallory Ortberg
I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September.
Claire Hennessy
For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.
Frederik Pohl
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.
Alberto Manguel
God gives every bird its food but he does not throw it into the nest.
J.G. Holland
Visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.
Mary Ann Shaffer
So,” said Zia, “you’re gonna eat your way through the whole universe, top to bottom. And then what?
Adam Christopher
October turned my maple's leaves to gold The most are gone now here and there one lingers Soon these will slip from out the twig's weak hold Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.
T. B. Aldrich
The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.
Joseph Epstein
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
The website didn't say how much brains--or even how many--I should eat, only that I should eat them in 48 hours OR ELSE. Why doesn't anyone pay attention to details anymore? Would it be so hard to add a simple line like, BTW, Maddy, 3 pounds of brains per week is plenty?Seriously, am I the first new zombie ever to ask?
Rusty Fischer
The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.
Asti Hustvedt
At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.
William Maxwell
It was the perfect set. Theseus gave a great war cry and brought his sword arcing up toward Sheba’s throat - but the monster of the labyrinth lives inside us all. She is the dark, devouring hunger that is never sated, the creeping shadow that ever plays the fiend to our seraphim, the secret rage hidden in our hearts; deny her, and we become her slaves; fight her, and we make her invincible. By now, you must know that no monster can ever be killed, not really - […]
Troy Denning
Can't get away from your own self.
Holly Black
The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
Joseph Epstein
Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
Alberto Manguel
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
Further, deeper still, those whose true names are for ever hidden from the world picked up the pattern of vibrations in the ether, and something akin to joy stirred in their fathomless minds. Perhaps soon they would be called upon to feed.
Marc Gascoigne
Instead of loving your enemies treat your friends a little better.
Edgar Watson Howe
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Alberto Manguel
True Love… it’s the most wonderful human emotion and one of the most elusive. We search for it, trying to find that one person in the whole world worthy enough to spend our lives with. When you look at the trail of broken hearts, the rivers of tears and the broken dreams, it’s quite obvious that it’s not an easy dream to achieve. Don’t we rightly call it the Quest for Love? That’s why when we think we’ve found the right person, we are giddy with happiness and relief. Finally! The answer to our prayers has come after such a long wait. We are safe. We are loved.A lot of women view marriage this way and I blame that on all the Walt Disney cartoons we watched as little girls. There’s this beautiful helpless princess locked away in a castle and here comes this handsome prince to save her from her miserable life. Classic. Then, after the grand wedding ball, the movie ends with:“And They Lived Happily Ever After.”That’s it? What happened afterwards? Nothing’s mentioned about that. We are made to think that it all ends there, that the couple’s happiness is secured and a given. They love each other, right? They went through all that trouble just to be together. So they’ll be happy. End of story.
Eeva Lancaster
Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
If you truly must obey your mistress. If you truly must have revenge, then you can start with me. But if you choose to follow your own path, well you can start that with me too if you like.
Steve Hockensmith
Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come," Tuek said. "Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow–we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart–water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.
Frank Herbert
As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
Alberto Manguel
Sloppy raggedy-assed old life. I love it. I never want to die.
Dennis Trudell
I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
Frederik Pohl
There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.
Keith Bellows
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.
Willie Morris