Quotes by Editors - Page 19

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.
Frank Herbert
When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.
Frank Herbert
Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality.
Frank Herbert
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
Frank Herbert
We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.
Anne Fadiman
And yet, wasn't the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears?
Adam Langer
Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.
Brian Doyle
I've thought and thought, but there's no other way to give you the truth except to hide it in a story and let you find your own way inside. All stories contain a truth if you look hard enough - but it might not be a good truth.
Kirsty Logan
... We would be foolish to say of Miss Moss, for example, that the words female and store owner and tall and thirtyish and kindly an unmarried describe much of real substance about her, isn't that so? A great deal of who she really is are stories we do not know, stories she may or may not share, stories perhaps even she does not know the meaning and shape of quite yet. People are stories aren't they? And their stories keep changing and opening and closing and braiding and weaving and stitching and slamming to a halt and finding new doors and windows through which to tell themselves, isn't that so? Isn't that what happens to you all the time? It used to be when you were little that other people told you stories about yourself and where you came from, but then you begin to tell your own story, and you find that your story keeps changing in thrilling and painful ways and it's never in one place. Maybe each of us is a sort of village with lots of different beings living together under one head of hair, around the river of your pulse, the crossroads of who you were and who you wish to be.
Brian Doyle
But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.
Brian Doyle
There are stories in the air as thick as birds around me, he would say. I will save those stories from starving he would say. I have a great hunger for stories, he would say.
Brian Doyle
Ingratitude is a crime more despicable than revenge, which is only returning evil for evil, while ingratitude returns evil for good.
William George Jordan
On the off-chance you won't live forever, maybe you should try being happy now.
Janice Kaplan
Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
William Zinsser
Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.
Joseph Epstein
He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
Frank Herbert
He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.
Philip Zaleski
As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.
Philip Zaleski
Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.
Philip Zaleski
Life produces a different taste each time you take it.
Frank Herbert
Once someone's hurt you, it's harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn't stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.
Holly Black
My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams
Larry Smith
This is terrific. What a gorgeous kitchen. You’ve decorated it so beautifully. Now you’re going to have to clear all the counters. Vases. Books. Knickknacks. Get rid of all that stuff. I mean, it is just beautiful. Beautiful. I love what you’ve done with this house. Make sure you put it all away.” ~Real estate agent (p.76)
Dominique Browning
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.
S.T. Joshi
Ever since about 3.8 billion years ago, when the first cells began quivering in the primordial ooze, Evolution has produced a nonstop parade of inflatable noses, bizarre genitalia, awkward feeding habits, aggressively antisocial tendencies, and mucus. So much mucus.
Mara Grunbaum
My brother trolled recovery and support groups, searching for women with dependency issues, the way I frequented bookstores with the hope of finding a well-adjusted, intelligent woman. Between us, his record was more stellar, his sin more reprehensible; though, knowing my brother, he slept soundly through the night without ever experiencing the slightest remorse.
Richard J. O'Brien
It's so much more interesting to study a ... damaged world. I find it difficult to learn anything in a place that's too civilized.
Brian Herbert
He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.
Philip Zaleski
To Roland's relief, Jean de Joinville came to his aid. "Sire, this good knight wants only to preserve your life. Let us all ride together against the Egyptians.""If I ride against them alone, God will protect me," said Louis.A new figure pushed into the circle. He wore the white surcoat and red cross of a Templar over his mail. With a leap of his heart, Roland recognized Guido Bruchesi. Guido looked at him but did not acknowledge him. He went directly to the King.He spoke quietly but firmly. "Sire, what you have just said is presumption.""I do not see how that could be, brother Templar." But Louis took his foot out of the stirrup as Roland watched with growing hope. You can always catch Louis's attention with a religious argument, Roland thought, even on the battlefield."Sire," said Guido, "Satan tempted our Seigneur Jesus, telling Him that if He cast Himself down from the mountaintop, angels would lift him up." Guido cast a sidelong look at Amalric. "You, Sire, are being tempted to ride alone against the whole Egyptian army, expecting God's protection. You are demanding a miracle. That is presumption."Louis was silent for a moment. "Perhaps you are right." Roland let out a long breath.
Robert Shea
She'll be a fierce woman, that one. It'll take a hell of a man to love her right. Be like living with a thunderstorm. Same as her mother. A fierce woman. Force of nature. The kind of woman you just hand on for the ride. The most exciting and the most heartbreaking woman you could ever meet. They don't know their own minds most of the time, but their hearts are so damn big it hurts em inside.
Brian Doyle
Did I ever tell you about Asin? She is the wild woman of the woods. It's an old story of the People. My mom used to tell me about Asin. Asin couldn't bear being married or having children or having friends. She always wanted to run wild. She ran wild through the woods. If you saw her running you had to run to water as fast as you could and drink or her restlessness would come into you like a thirst that could never be quenched. She was happy and unhappy. She had wild long hair and she was very tall and she ran like the wind. When you saw dunegrass rippling in a line she was running through it. When the wind changed direction suddenly that was Asin. She was never satisfied or content and so she ran and ran and ran. She would grab men who were fishing alone and make love to them and then throw them down on the ground and run away weeping. She would grab children who wandered too far alone in the woods but she would return them to the same spot after three days and run away again. She would listen to women talking by the fire or working in the village or gathering berries but if they invited her to join them she ran away. You could hear her crying sometimes when the sun went down. She wanted something but she never knew what it was so she had nothing. She was as free as anyone ever could be and she was trapped. When I was young I wanted to be Asin. Many times I wanted to be Asin. So do you, Nora. I know. It's okay. It's alright. My sweet love. Poor Asin. Sometimes I think to be Asin would be the saddest thing in the world. Poor thing.
Brian Doyle
The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.
Asti Hustvedt
Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease.
Brenda Wilmoth Lerner
We all want to live in a world where we can make a difference... That's why Spider-Man fights the good fight. Or Captain Marvel. Or me. Or... There are a lot of us. And we don't all wear masks these days. Iron Man went public. So did Captain America. Others. Probably because it's harder to keep secrets in an internet surveillance age. But I think some of it, too, is that the ethical paradox can wear you down. No one on the white-hat side has ever hidden his or her identity with less than noble intent: to make the fight about something bigger than us. To represent a greater justice, where the focus can be on right and wrong... and not on whether the bad guys will exact reprisal on those close to us. And sometimes you have to lie... because you can justify a lie if lives are riding on it. Even as you fight for, as the saying goes, truth and justice... even if you're a lawyer who has sworn to live by the truth... you willingly bear false witness.
Mark Waid
I realized that what matters with any innovation is that it actually creates more value for people.
Stuart Crainer
It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.
William Maxwell
In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views--I just didn't think about religion.
Will Schwalbe
Nonbelievers are not anti-religious, they are anti-fraud and anti-deception.
Steve Fowler
Far from being marginalized, as is presently the case, nineteenth-century freethought was a social movement at the core of our national life.
Fred Whitehead
Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, 'Don't you realize it was a placebo!' Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing.
Peter De Vries
...two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
Will Schwalbe
She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.
Will Schwalbe
Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.
Joseph Epstein
No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
Brian Herbert
Love. Passion. Belief. Duty. The lines blur sometomes. There are ove fifteen recognised mjor religions on this planet. One religion believes something different from another, and yet so often it's just the same thing with a different name, or a different form of worship, or a different headdress. But they will fight to protect what they believe in, no matter the cost. You've been here a while Jack. How many wars, how many lives squandered on religion. Then we get to science. Science versus creationism for instance. Two opposing stances on the same subject, neither of which has evidence to back it up
Gary Russell
It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are is God's providential arrangement - God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made our of them.
Will Schwalbe
The right path and easy path are usually two different things, and when it’s time to choose, always choose the right path over the easy.
Deatri King-Bey
The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.' And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.
Frank Herbert
I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.
Holly Black
Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.
Joseph Epstein
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Péguy
Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.
Frank Herbert
In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence, and chaos wherever they touched.
Frank Herbert
There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.
Frank Herbert
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner.
Frank Herbert
Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Frank Herbert
The best government is that which governs least.
John L. O'Sullivan
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
Frank Herbert