Quotes by Editors - Page 14

Killing things shouldn't make you happy, Rosa. That's why they're worried.
Justine Larbalestier
A walk with a two-year-old is very Zen; it is not about the end but the journey. He needs to pet the dog someone is walking; to roll down the slight incline to the church basement, and then roll again, and again, and again; to remind me of the place where the wasps (he calls them bees) live, then zoom past it.
Marc Aronson
Soldiers falling fastBattle of white and scarletBlossoms on the ground
David Kudler
And the question of Wester religion,” Flattery said, “is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?
Frank Herbert
So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.
Anne Fadiman
What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.
Frank Herbert
Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.
Daniel José Older
If your career doesn’t work out, write a book about it.
Marcy Sheiner
The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year.
Jeff Deck
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
The moon seemed to veil herself before the bold looks of Satan. The night was cold. All the doors were closed, all the windows darkened. and the streets deserted. From their appearance, one would have imagined that, for a long time past no foot had traversed those silent streets. Everything around us bore a death-like aspect. It seemed as if, when day came, no one would open their doors; that no head, of woman or of child, would look out of those dark, dull windows; that no step would break the silence which fell, like a pall, upon all around. I seemed to be walking in a city which had been buried some ages. In truth, the town seemed to have been depopulated, and the cemetery to have grown full.Still we went forward, without hearing a murmur, or meeting even with a shadow. The street stretched for a long way across this fearful city of silence and repose. At last we reached my house.'You remember it?' said the fiend.'Yes,' replied I, sullenly, 'let us enter.' 'First,' said he, 'we must open the door. It is I, by the way, who invented the science of opening doors without breaking them in. In fact, I have a second key to all doors and gates - with one exception - that of Paradise!
James Hain Friswell
Try to be a whole person. Not just a night person, or a day person. Be the kind of person who can live in both.
Regina Doman
I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights scoured sand. What was ever found but women in skirts folded around the men they loved that Friday? No one found me. And how could that have been, here, whereeven botanical names were recordedand small roads mapped in red?Night, the sky is black paper pecked with pinholes.
Deborah Ager
Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.
Anne Fadiman
From the floor, I see the tops of the Philadelphia skyline out of her window. Staring at it, I realize that the night sky isn't really black, which is the way I've always thought of it. It's actually a dark shade of blue, the darkest possible.
Siobhan Vivian
It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in witch they it right back to the weaker one and never think of escaping from the whole filthy mess.
Rona Jaffe
Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.
Alberto Manguel
Abstaining from sex, hitting the books, and wearing loose-fitting clothes are common ways that girls try to molt their "slutty" image. But more often their shame leads them to self-destructive behavior. They become willing to do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing before they were scandalized because they now feel they have so little to offer. Some girls do drugs or drink to excess in an attempt to blot away their stigma. Others become depressed and anorexic. And others think so little of themselves that they date boys who insult or beat them.
Leora Tanenbaum
Intercourse was now forbidden to everyone but married people; bundling disappeared. In its place young courting couples engaged in "petting"--which, interpreted broadly, meant that they were could do anything sexual short of intercourse. Women were now held responsible for controlling men's beastly sexuality--halting them from simply plunging ahead--at the same time that they were expected to be sexually innocent: an impossible position.
Leora Tanenbaum
Anyone who doesn't want you to be happy with who you are is an asshole. Fuck pleasing everyone else. You only live once. Who are you gonna do it for?
Dahlia Adler
When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?
Christopher Bollen
All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.
Christopher Bollen
Maturity turns out to be a question you can never answer with confidence, despite advanced age and wage.
Brian Doyle
I'm too old to figure out the rights and wrongs of everything.
Barbara Else
What the world neglects, the Lord accepts.
Deborah Brodie
In the distance, steel-blue mountains loomed heavy on the horizon, their shoulders burdened with the same accursed snow the gods were currently depositing upon the lowlands. Between us and the mountains, the vast expanse of one of the innumerable caravan sites littering the Welsh shores was dimly visible, and at the far edges of the sands, grey waves tipped a mulch of brown foam up on to the beach, a sudden deposition of wishy-washy creatures that seemed to spider-leg over each other in their haste to reach the shore and see what all the fuss was about.But even these creatures comprised of sea-foam were freaked out by the death-stare, for the little critters swiftly dissipated under the force of a skeletal glower.A skull lay in the sand, its empty sockets staring down the beach at the retreating surge. Their fear wouldn’t last long. Soon they’d realise the skeleton had not engaged in pursuit, their confidence would grow, and they’d encroach, further and further up the bank. Eventually, they’d be close enough to see it was completely inert, and would overrun our position, victoriously sweeping up their fallen foe and dragging it back out with them into the dreary waves.
Hazel Butler
I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …
Hazel Butler
I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control.
Leora Tanenbaum
If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the strength to tell of the name-callers on my own. But at the time, all I knew was that if I avoided eye contact, it was a hell of a lot easier to get through my days.
Leora Tanenbaum
In a setting of formal education, one would imagine that abstract thought would be encouraged, and that questioning obvious errors within the current system wouldn’t be frowned upon. Wrong again; these cunts are out to protect their pocket books and paradigms.
Scott Parker
No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.
Burton Rascoe
Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.
Leora Tanenbaum
EQUAL RIGHTS and FREE DISCUSSION will be fearlessly advocated and maintained. Sectarian dogmas or tenets will be investigated and compared.
Abner Cole
I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.
Kathe Koja
He was Control, and he was in control.
Jeff VanderMeer
[denial] is an attempt to bring order to our lives.
Mark Galli
We say we long for intimacy with God and others, and yet we structure our lives so that this becomes impossible. One might think we are avoiding intimacy, that maybe we really like our finely managed lives just the way they are.
Mark Galli
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian Wiman
People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.
Michael Pryor
I do not fully understand the way of human beings. They are a curious and remarkable tribe altogether. They are capable of anything. I know that much. They are a constant surprise to me. They are a constant surprise to themselves also. They appear to live in a state of constant amazement. This makes them refreshing and infuriating. But there is a greatness about them sometimes. More perhaps than they know. Or a capacity for greatness. More than they know. It’s confusing but I know this to be true. I have learned that much in all these years.
Brian Doyle
Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.
Terri Windling
The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people...Her sympathy for the underdog--or the underwasp, underrat, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede--was limitless. In the depths of a gloomy London winter she would trudge to the park with a bag of snacks--stale bread specially sautéed in drippings--for the poor freezing seagulls and ducks. At the height of a Provencal summer she would fill a shallow bowl with water, put it on the terrace, and watch, transfixed, as the poor thirsty wasps hovered just above the surface to take a restorative sip or two. Dogs and cats slept in her bed, baby birds were fed warm milk with eyedroppers, spiders were fished out of baths, and a colony or red ants, which feasted on honey and scurried around inside a special box with a glass lid, lived on the kitchen table in London for many years.
Gully Wells
I have never heard anyone say, 'Oh, ick! A horse!
Elinor Goulding Smith
A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.
Frank Herbert
Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.
Terri Windling
In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.
Terri Windling
I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial
Susie Bright
One did not love revolution. One embraced it with horror for the sake of the deliverance to follow.
Gabrielle Warnock
With a smile of grim satisfaction, he bellowed his call. And the rebels surged forward in an act that would be remembered for ten thousand years.
Brian Herbert
You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.
Frank Herbert
Christ in a Pinata` how have I over complicated the plot?
Scott Parker
Christ is not alive now because he rose from the dead two thousand years ago. He rose from the dead two thousand years ago because he is alive right now.
Christian Wiman
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
To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it.
Mark Galli
I never think of him as a scholar assaulting me with how much he knows, but as a teacher eager to share a lifelong passion for the subject.
William Zinsser
I wanted to explain so much to him at that moment, but you can't give a six-year-old the perspective of a 40-year-old, not really, so I gave him the short course.
David Skinner
A missionary deals with all the important people of the community, but he is never really one of them.
Henry R. Luce
The more the world commits to programs for poverty and education, the greater the gap for those with intellectual disabilities. That’s because money goes where results are quick and quantifiable, which is not likely for people with intellectual disabilities.
LAWRENCE DOWNES
A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.
Philip Zaleski