Quotes by Bloggers - Page 4

We have so long been subject to external criticism that we don’t know how to react to internal criticism, because whereas the most enduring, positive and sensible response to the former is a united front – you shall not divide us, here we stand – responding to the latter is an entirely different ballgame.This is my fear: that as a community, we don’t know how to critique ourselves, and that this is dong us damage. Criticism, and specifically the criticism of both literary publications and the mainstream press, has so long been the weapon of the enemy that our first response on seeing it wielded internally is to call it the work of traitors. We have found strength in the creation of our own conventions and the hallowing of our own legends, flourishing to such an extent that, even if we are not yet accepted into the mainstream literary establishment, we are nonetheless part of the cultural mainstream. We are written about inaccurately, yet we are written about; and if there ever was a time when the whole genre seemed a precarious, faddish endeavour, then that time is surely past.Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA
Foz Meadows
And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant.We, all of us, need to get critical.Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA
Foz Meadows
It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
Fredrik Backman
Because when you love someone very much, it's difficult to learn to share her with someone else.
Fredrik Backman
Being on Facebook as an Author and listing your books is like being a tiny single word in a giant dictionary! If people don’t search for you they don’t find you. They don’t take notice of you. They don’t even know you exist! Thats the hard reality of Socialmedia!
Lily Amis
Allowing Islamic Sharia law into the constitutions of the U.S-created Islamic (!) Republic of Afghanistan and Republic of Iraq in 2004 and 2005 was as foolhardy as it would have been to write emperor-worship and Shinto militarism into Japan's 1946 constitution.
Robert Spencer
Such a simplified lifestyle can be truly wonderful - you'll finally have time for the things you really love, for relaxation, for outdoor activities, for exercise, for reading or finding peace and quiet, for the loved ones in your life, for the things you're most passionate about. This is what it means to thrive - to live a life full of the things you want in them, and not more. To live a better quality of life without having to spend and buy and consume.
Leo Babauta
You need to decide what works for you. But ultimately, hold out for adoration and respect
Catherine Sanderson
My dad encouraged me to quit my job and pursue the life that I am about to have. He got excited with me. He was the first one to tell me that I could do it. I am 30 years old, and I still find great power in my own dad telling me it’s possible.I still find great power in my own dad telling me I can do it.
Dan Pearce
My entire life, I’ve never been able to understand the concept of not being happy or excited when others were successful or had something good happen to them. It quite honestly is a concept that I cannot grasp.
Dan Pearce
Simply put, she was the one who had to put up with me. That she did so with love and patience and encouragement instead of strangling me, throwing my remains into a wood chipper, and then pretending she had never been married to me at all is a testament to the fact that she is, in fact, the single best person I know.
John Scalzi
We may well find that if we are to fulfill God's mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality.
Tim Challies
You would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself.
John Scalzi
The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill.
John Scalzi
Space is a precious thing to waste. You don't want to fill your house with anything that doesn't directly add to your happiness.
Sherry Petersik
Sometimes we need to look at everything going wrong in our lives and admit to ourselves, "I am the only common denominator here.
Dan Pearce
All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.
Fredrik Backman
[W]e wouldn't want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin places of pain and brokenness because readers can see themselves in the pain and want to journey from pain and struggle toward redemption or some kind of resolution.
Ed Cyzewski
I will one day accept death with gratitude if I meet it having lived a life that became truly my own.
Dan Pearce
Once we forget those who have contributed time and effort in making an endeavor successful, we forget ourselves.
Beem Weeks
Nothing in life is yours to keep—not your children, not your friends and family, not your lover, not your material possessions, not your youth and vitality, not your struggles (which is great news) or successes, not your body and not even your life. Everything in life is given to you for a short period of time, to enjoy, to learn from, to appreciate and to love, but never to keep.
Luminita D. Saviuc
Find a way to change your attitude for the better and your life will change for the better with little effort from you.
Dan Pearce
I will never have greater respect than for the man that realizes he was wrong and graciously admits it without a single excuse.
Dan Pearce
What we don't know can't hurt us.
John Scalzi
Relations were never good (how comfortable can you really be with a race that sees you as a nutritious part of a complete breakfast).
John Scalzi
I near felt bad he choose to be so evil to me. I am a forgiving woman, but my pen... oh my wicked wicked hormonal she-pen.
Coco J. Ginger
Man who treat Woman without respect and see Woman ONLY as a public toilett forget where they spend their first 9 months of their Life!
Lily Amis
Man who TOY with Womans feelings and emotions are heartless & faithless creatures. But don’t hate them. Show empathy because they are poor & forgotten souls !
Lily Amis
People usually live up to their expectations. The kid picked first for dodgeball feels a duty to be the best, and to perform the best, and to be better than anyone else. They feel a need to execute. And, the only way they are going to achieve that is to make their body run faster, jump higher, and move quicker.If more fat kids were chosen first for activities and sports and group/team dynamics, they would automatically start to change their lives to fit into the expectations that surround those moments. Any time a child is picked last, they know it’s because people expect the least of them, and so they never actually have a need to rise above that.
Dan Pearce
Jack Holloway told me he would get the son of a bitch who killed my child and the mate of my child," Papa continued. "Jack Holloway did get that son of a bitch. Jack Holloway got you. You are the man who killed my child. Get off my planet, you son of a bitch.
John Scalzi
While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation.
Rachel Held Evans
Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.
Hemant Mehta
Where religion clashes with science is that religion makes smart people do stupid things.
P.Z. Myers
So much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God is somewhat bewildering, as no one appears to be nearly as excited about a similar absence of belief in unicorns, vampires, werewolves, astrology, nation-building, or the Labor Theory of Value. Nor is anyone dedicating much of their time to writing books and giving speeches at universities and conferences with the avowed goal of convincing others not to believe in them either.
Vox Day
Improvement is always on the schedule for tomorrow. Change is always taking place some time in the future. It’s human nature.
Dan Pearce
Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.
Dan Pearce
Life has a habit of making the easy desperately difficult, and the hardest choices so easy as to be no choice at all.
Catherine Sanderson
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Glenn Reynolds
If I wasn't so phenomenal. I would go back to you.
Coco J. Ginger
Everything has an ending" that’s what he said. But "True love has no ending", that’s what I say.
Lily Amis
...I feel like a traitor, a phony, a fake. But I am a hypocrite with the best intentions, and I need kissing desperately.
Coco J. Ginger
As an orangutan cannot embrace higher mathematics or comprehend the architecture and operation of a computer, we humans __ so good at loudly proclaiming our intelligence and applauding our own doltish displays of cerebral gymnastics __ cannot begin to understand the true structure and functioning of the Universe.
John Rachel
The universe is a big place. Maybe we're not in the best neighborhood.
John Scalzi
I'm going to go pee. If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it's best to meet it with an empty bladder.
John Scalzi
The universe isn't going to be conquered by legions of geriatrics. No offense.
John Scalzi
After our negotiations were completed, the dome would be imploded and launched toward the nearest black hole, so that none of its atoms would ever contaminate this particular universe again. I thought that last part was overkill.
John Scalzi
After leaving Egypt, Moses and his people endured a forty-year commute, starting with a truly epic crossing of the Red Sea (which made getting through the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour seem like traipsing across a country bridge in a sundress on a spring afternoon).
BikeSnobNYC
But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the angel" as they used to say back then), so rather than try to fix it, He instead decided to simply wash everyone away in a great flood and start over from scratch--just as you might do to your computer's hard drive if it has a really bad virus. So God spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark, aboard which he'd carry two of every animal in the world....Thus was born humankind's lust for gigantic vehicles, for God's instructions to Noah were basically the world's first car commercial, and the sales pitch was this: Large vehicles are your salvation.
BikeSnobNYC
I don't know which Bible stories ought to be treated as historically accurate, scientifically provable accounts of facts and which stories are meant to be metaphorical. I don't know if it really matters so long as those stories transform my life.
Rachel Held Evans
Silence doesn’t have to be a major pilgrimage into the wilderness in order to find a solitary space. Everyday tasks such as driving around town, folding laundry, preparing food, washing dishes, or taking walks can all provide a measure of solitude each day when approached with the right mindset and a commitment to shut off televisions, computers, tablets, smartphones, radios, and anything else that could interrupt silence.
Ed Cyzewski
Defend myself? I cannot defend the verbal repressions of a boy. A curmudgeonly, cantankerous, ill-tempered, counterfeit boy.
Coco J. Ginger
Life is too short to eat food that doesn't taste good.
Alana Chernila
My first encounter with a baguette, torn still warm from its paper sheathing, shattered and sighed on contact. The sound stopped me in my tracks, the way a crackling branch gives deer pause; that’s what good crust does. Once I began to chew, the flavor unfolded, deep with yeast and salt, the warm humidity of the tender crumb almost breathing against my lips.
Sasha Martin
You were sizzling, like sausages in a frying pan.
Kristina Adams
Food—like art, like music— brings people together, it’s true. It begins, though, with a private experience, a single person stirred, moved, and wanting company in that altered stated. So we say, “You have to taste this.” We say, “Please, take a bite.
Jessica Fechtor
After I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I said yes to food, with great enthusiasm. . . . I vowed to taste everything I could eat, rather than focusing on what I could not.
Shauna James Ahern
I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared - that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it's tracks, to label it "secret" just seems mean.
Molly Wizenberg
Relationships based on dishonesty, lies,Secrets and cheats R not only predictedto fail but also a waste of precious timeand energie! U can’t fool yourself 4ever!
Lily Amis
The word on the street was that I had two options when it came to caring for my future baby: I could either eat, sleep, drink, bathe, walk, and work with my baby permanently affixed to my body until the two of us meld into one, or I could leave my baby out naked on a cold millstone to cry, refusing to hold or feed her until the schedule allowed. Apparently, there was no in between.
Rachel Held Evans
As parents we're meant to help each other out and build each other up.
Galit Breen