Quotes by Editors - Page 18

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
For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.
Joseph Epstein
Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".
Philip Zaleski
One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.
Philip Zaleski
Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.
Rob Bignell
...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.
Rob Bignell
Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.
Rob Bignell
There is always, always, always something to write about.
Rob Bignell
Writing heals my heart like no pill ever could.
Rob Bignell
Every book I've read appears in my writing.
Rob Bignell
But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche'. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest," - these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away, We stop reading.
William Zinsser
It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough
William Zinsser
Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody.
William Zinsser
But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.
William Zinsser
Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.
William Zinsser
I am not a slow writer, I am not a fast writer . . . I am a half-fast writer.
Robert Lynn Asprin
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
Alberto Manguel
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
Sally Brampton
Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.
Fulton Oursler
You're yourself," Tana said, grinning. "More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can't see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.
Holly Black
Their message is conveyed in that hortatory tone and declamatory voice used by politicians when starting a condition contrary to fact. People who aren't cowed don't spend a lot of time proclaiming they won't be cowed. Leaders who really have strengthened the voice of freedom don't don't need to reassure there electorates that they're committed to doing so.
William Kristol
We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?
John L. O'Sullivan
Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I'll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He'd have to—you'd not grant anyone else something you can't have for yourself—no love, no kindness, no respect!
Mary Ann Shaffer
Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.
Brian Francis Slattery
...mindfulness - it isn't a trick or a gimmick. It's being present in the moment. When I'm with you, I'm with you. Right now. That's all. No more and no less.
Will Schwalbe
Lee was a born pedagogue, never happier than when his children were learning to do something the right way. It is a testament to Lee's affection and patience that his children did not rebel. In fact, they appear to have thrived.
Michael Korda
If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.
William Zinsser
Staring into someone’s eyes for a long time is psychic. At first it’s very strange and scary - scarier than the first time you have sex. Then you begin to relax, and the person you’re looking at may become very beautiful. As you look into their eyes, you may see them change sex or race. You can see the child in an old person and a young person may appear ancient. Just looking into someone’s eyes for a long time can be trippier than taking acid.
Steve Abbott
J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.
Philip Zaleski
Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.
Philip Zaleski
We speak, and write, in one of the most diverse, gloriously ecumenical tongues on the planet. In English, there is a word or phrase for pretty much anything we want to say, and if there isn't, we make it up, and it is welcomed into the family. We can express ourselves as complexly or as simply as we like. We can be magniloquent didacts, or we can talk plain.
Jeff Deck
As human beings, how do we choose to react in that instant when someone walks toward us, smiles, and begins to speak?
Jeff Deck
The potential, for anything, was overwhelming to a degree that bothered him. It wasn’t, he thought, the idea of power. It certainly wasn’t that nervous feeling T.C. would get in the pit of his stomach when he knew he had an incredible opportunity in front of him, that amazing brief pause before an act of creation. This was something else. Something to fear and respect.
Adam P. Knave
Everyone deserves respect and justice no matter what they look like.
Lesley Kinzel
If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.
Holly Black
They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.
Frederik Pohl
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Do you know what sentence of his (Wordsworth) I admire the most? It is "The bright day is done, and we are for the dark." I wish I'd known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them--and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Remaining aware of awareness, witnessing it thru every experience within without one, is the way and the goal both...Be Happy and keep smiling...
Satish Kumar
Home is where we tie one end of the thread of life.
Martin Buxbaum
Our home tells a story about us, so we may as well take the opportunity to make it a stylish one.
Deborah Needleman
Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.
Christopher Bollen
Don't know. Don't care. I'm hopping on a bus and going until I can't go any farther. Until I find a place that feels like home.'He's quiet for a long time. 'How will you know what home feels like?'It hangs in the air between us, as frozen as our breaths. I don't have an answer.
Holly Black
I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.
Ruth Reichl
The most procession that ever comes to a man in this world is a women's heart.
Josiah G Holland AKA Timothy Titcomb
Don't be afraid of Pain. Pain only comes down to a certain point... beyond that, it can't reach you and the love you have inside.
Eeva Lancaster
We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.
Richard Jackson
Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.
Richard Jackson
Having experimented in both poetry and prose, I can say that the two are such loaded words. But neither are quite as weighted as the word “poet”. I think some people can write poetry their whole lives, and never truly BE a “poet”. Whereas I see poets in the wanderers I encounter, the baristas who serve me, and the truckers I, so, love to talk to.To be a poet in my humble opinion is to be a muse of the human experience. I love that I love the idea, that anything can be poetry, it can’t be defined. It’s a feeling, like punk rock. I’m not one for form or structure. I say if your words are visceral and honest, it’s poetry. If you see the beauty of the world and humanity, and you preach it, you’re a poet.
Mallory Smart
I suppose longevity requires giving up life's pleasures, one by one, until there's nothing left.
Gary Inbinder
To say "He was a young fool, and now he's an old fool" is to make a distinction without a difference.
Gary Inbinder
Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.
William Kristol
Americans have a tendency to take much of our long-term economic, technological, medical, and social progress for granted, while assuming problems will only get worse. This is unwarranted.
Rachel DiCarlo Currie
We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis
Philip Zaleski
The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.
Philip Zaleski
Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.
Philip Zaleski
Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Philip Zaleski
Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.
Philip Zaleski
Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.
Philip Zaleski