Quotes by Editors - Page 12

Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of her honor.
Noah Webster
The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.
Gary Inbinder
I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.
Peter De Vries
The Universe operates on a basic principle of economics: everything has its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past. We pay for every change we make . . . and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change.
Brian Herbert
Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!
Will Schwalbe
We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.
Rona Jaffe
The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.
Judith Regan
When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.
Mark Waid
Trying their wings once more in hopeless flight: Blind moths against the wires of window screens. Anything. Anything for a fix of light. X. J. Kennedy, "Street Moths," The Lords of Misrule
X.J. Kennedy
Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.
Sally Brampton
You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.
Holly Black
What do you feel like you SHOULD be doing instead of writing? IF you have an answer, then you have guilt. The "should" of life are always linked to guilt.
Andi Cumbo-Floyd
She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of hom took pleas; to had internalised their guilt so deeply that, aven after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime.
The New Yorker Magazine
There will be sadness," Alia intoned. "I remind you that all things are but beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity.
Frank Herbert
Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.
Rob Bignell
Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.
Rob Bignell
The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.
Rob Bignell
Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.
Terry McDonell
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Cyril Connolly
My cat is an ungrateful brat. -Nellie McKay
Larry Smith
Another cat? Perhaps. For love there is also a season; its seeds must be resown. But a family cat is not replaceable like a wornout coat or a set of tires. Each new kitten becomes its own cat, and none is repeated. I am four cats old, measuring out my life in friends that have succeeded but not replaced one another.
Irving Townsend
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
As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.
Ellen P. Berkeley
Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.
Jean Burden
If everything must be burned I will do the burning and so I will not be burnt but be the fire. Everything I ever loved burned and so I will be the burning. There is nothing but that must which be burnt. Women will burn and children burn and houses burn so I will be nothing that can burn. I will be the fire. The fire has no home. The fire goes where it wants. The fire arrives and departs and none can account the meaning of its travels. Everything I ever touched burned.
Brian Doyle
Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.
Frank Herbert
What the eyes had seen could not be erased.
Frank Herbert
Sincerity like this staggers me; I've seen too little and too much of it one way and another; I've valued it so highly that when someone hands it to me as directly as you have, I'm not sure whether I should jump for joy or burst into tears. — Gwendolyn MacEwen to Milton Acorn, 1960 (age 19)
David Eso
If you're in love, love to the limit; and if you hate, why hate like the devil and if it's a fight you're in, get where it's hottest and fight like hell - if you don't life's not worth the living.
Abraham Grace Merritt
If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.He will have nothing to live for.
James Edwin Gunn
Don't get so holy, Pearce. Life isn't holy.
James Edwin Gunn
We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
Stanley Kunitz
On the day after Christmas, some store or another will always take out and ad saying there are only 364 shopping days to Christmas. No one is amused.
Gerard Del Re
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies!
Francis Pharcellus Church
I manage a toast to the Christmas treeand one to the sweet absurdityin the miracle of the verb to be.Lucky you, lucky me.
Miller Williams
Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.
Frank Herbert
As mortal humans we are born with a death sentence anyway, so what difference does a little poison make? Why not take a chance you will survive the ordeal and make something significant of your life?..." p330
Brian Herbert
A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.
Hazel Butler
I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion.
Holly Black
He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.
Philip Zaleski
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?
Frank Herbert
We are all fools blessed with the knowledge that certain events will come to pass no matter what path we take to get there. The wise ones follow their angels while they may.
Alethea Kontis
Human beings, when confronted with the strange and inexplicable, have an immediate instinct to get back to the accustomed and the normal. We do not hug our miracles close; we put them hastily away, preferring the commonplace to live with it. It is as if some compulsive hand wipes clean the wall on which the handwriting appeared.
Fulton Oursler
Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling back and forth. Tilting freely, to and fro. One does not like to think that sometimes it is the angel that falls.
Holly Black
The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality.
Ray Rhamey
Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.
T.E. Grau
Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.
Adam Langer
Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing." "What book?" I say. Then : "Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._________I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet. In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it.
Phillip Margulies
Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession
Alexandra Johnson
I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
M.V. Carey
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
More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
M.V. Carey
For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured.“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”“You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.
Frank Herbert
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
Autumn said to me, "You see, the best thing about wrong decisions is that they don't prevent you from making the right decisions later on. It's harder, but it's impossible
Siobhan Vivian
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
Stewart Brand
He thought, I got wings on my eyes, and the thought was so odd and yet so pleasing to him that he felt suddenly that he was immensely special, that there could be no one like him in the world.
Deborah Treisman
Lobster-both-ways is popular tonight. The preparation is easy enough. Take a two-pound lobster. Kill it with a sharp chef’s knife straight between the eyes. Remove the claw and knuckle meat. Steam for five minutes, chop into salad with aioli, celery, and lots of shallots and chives. Chill. Reserve the tail until ordered. Paint with herb-infused oil, season with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, grill for two or three minutes until it’s just cooked through. Serve with spicy organic greens.
Graydon Carter
We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?
Frank Herbert