Quotes by Editors - Page 13

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.
Frank Herbert
If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.
Frank Herbert
Donny recovered herself. “Dude, that was the seventh sign of the apocalypse. I’m so not going to class on the last day of the world.
Gwen Hayes
Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura," the Duke said. "I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.
Frank Herbert
Sweet Goddess! she thought suddenly. I have never even spoken to him. I know nothing about the man, nothing at all.What if he tries to get me into some sordid little room and force himself on me, like an animal? How will I fight him off? All alone, not able to cry for help?No, it will not be like that, it could not be. I would have known if he were that kind of man, and felt repelled. He could not sing and write such beautiful verses, and look so fine if he were not the man I want him to be. Yes, when we meet, it will be as it is in his songs. He will obey, do exactly what I tell him and no more. Oh, I have hoped so long for this. Goddess of Love, let it be beautiful.
Robert Shea
Lust is like a robin attacking his reflection in a pane of glass again and again.
Leslie Daniels
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
Arnold Edinborough
Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?
Frank Herbert
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Peter De Vries
How did you know they were there?" Glory asked. "Oh wait, I forgot, NightWings are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-brilliant, right?" "Don't forget al-wonderful and all-brilliant.
Tui T. Sutherland
Deep down, he's shallow.
Peter De Vries
The next day was wonderful...and terrible. So, overall, I guess it was okay.
The Harvard Lampoon
To exist, the triangle demands three complementary elements: love, power and danger. Mixed incautiously, these elements, like those in physics, are volatile and potentially explosive.
Ruth Harris
The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.
Frank Herbert
I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.
Wendy McClure
books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation.
Will Schwalbe
My duty, I know, is to lead. I cannot offer an array of options. I must offer a long but narrow path to Salvation, and guide the Saints down it. Were that path wide and varied, it would lead nowhere; and I will then have failed both God and man.
David Ebershoff
Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place.
Brian Doyle
Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.
Ted Solotaroff
What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.
Christian Wiman
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
Christian Wiman
Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.
Russell Blackford
Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.
Alfred Bester
You will all be assailed, my dear friends, by the very real temptation to believe that you have been forsaken by God – that your priesthood is in vain, and that the weight of mortal grief and sin is more than you can bear. In the midst of your anguish you will ask of Him a sign, some visible ray of His unchanging light in a world of hideous darkness. I am sorry to say that this visible sign will rarely be given. The burning bush of Moses, the jewel-encrusted dove of Theresa, the Tolle lege of Augustine – these are no longer the style, as in the simpler days of saint and prophet. The light will be interior; you must look for it within
Henry Morton Robinson
One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against.
Joshua Rothman
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
Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.
Peter De Vries
A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.
Kevin Kelly
As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .
Lee Gutkind
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.
Billie Sue Mosiman
Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.
Rob Bignell
There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.
Rob Bignell
Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.
Rob Bignell
It probably seems obvious, but as an editor, I love stories. But it’s a little bit more than that. I intensely believe that stories have power. They can spark an idea, or a realization. They can, by just offering another perspective, change a person’s mind. They can make us weep and cry and care. And they can connect us. That’s powerful stuff.
Mariah Huehner
What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.
Allison K. Williams
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
Frank Herbert
Ambition was a dull pain, like a continually broken heart.
Enid Shomer
Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.
Frank Herbert
June’s clients did not have the patience to deal with problems or the personal courage and energy to find solutions on their own. What they did have was an almost endless supply of capital. With that capital, June’s clients could hire people to solve any problem with minimal effort. That is what June did; she solved problems by the process of elimination.
Clark Chamberlain
I don't think my moped could outrun a cheetah.""Hun," Claire says. "There are more important things you need to outrun, and a moped isn't going to help you with any of those.
Jonathan Messinger
I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it's a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it's a great choice to have a career. But I don't entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others... But I also don't approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don't work - maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best think anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other - and no one has a monopoly on teaching that.
Will Schwalbe
Whatever it is in your life that is separating you from Jesus Christ, he knows about it. He longs for you to come to him now, so he can lend you his strength to overcome your weaknesses. His love is there for you, as solid and sturdy as a brick. He doesn't turn away in disgust when you make a mistake, no matter how many times you've made that mistake before. If you'll let him, he'll pick you up and dust you off and say 'Try again. I know you'll do better next time.' And because he never gives up on you, you will try again, and eventually, with his help, you'll conquer whatever it is that brought you down.
Emily Watts
Our Company was participating in a management seminar in which we were taught a strategy that goes by the unlovely name of 'reverse your buts.' I did not make this up! It works like this:Maybe you're thinking, 'I love you, but you're driving me crazy.' Instead, try thinking, 'You're driving me crazy, but I love you." Isn't it amazing how different that feels?
Emily Watts
...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.
Anne Fadiman
You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.
Elissa Schappell
A spirit of satirical frivolity so dominated Britain in the 1960s that one critic feared the country "would sink giggling into the sea.
John O'Sullivan
Every single day an estimated eighteen million men gratuitously waste the future of our country, by needlessly ejaculating one hundred million citizens of our country, which had they been born, would have made us the strongest country on the planet.
Scott Andrews
In such societies it is common for ordinary people to seek out celibate spiritual leaders for marriage, love and sometimes sexual guidance. This strikes me as a particularly stupid kind of folly. Nobody ever asks a vegetarian for a recommendation for a steak house
Scott Andrews
If you are against abortions, don't have one.
Scott Andrews
The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty."Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.
Frederik Pohl
Once inside I stripped off my clothes and showered. Refreshed, I pick up my phone and type. ME: I want you. Come over now if you feel the same way.I held my breath as a I waited for a response but after several minutes none came. Maybe he wasn't going to come.
Gwendolyn Grace
In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories
Sol Stein
The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep
Edgar Watson Howe
They say that secrets live at the bottom of a wine bottle. Mama had made it there the night before, slow glass by slow glass, but she'd never spoken a word.
Alethea Kontis
It's naive to assume that another person can fulfill you, or save you, if the two things are, in fact, different, and I have never felt that way with Colin. I simply believe that he fulfills an important part of me, and that Robert fulfilled another equally important part of me. The part of me Robert fulfilled is a part which I imagine Colin, even now, doesn't know exists. It is the part of me that can destroy as easily as it loves. It is the part of me that feels safest and most at home behind closed doors, in a dark bedroom, that believes that the only truth lies in the secrets we keep from each other.
Andrew Porter
She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.
Rona Jaffe
Damn! - I'd rather walk into something of my own accord than to be frogmarched into it.""So it says here in the file. James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded. Can be trusted to do anything at all - provided the alternative is worse.""You sound like my father. Did he tell you that?""The Service does not reveal its sources of information.
Eric Frank Russell
There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.
William Maxwell
I don't think they're terrible parents. They love us. I think they're negligent parents. That's not the same thing.
Justine Larbalestier