Quotes by Editors - Page 26

They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.
Jeff VanderMeer
Friends have ways of speaking without words.
Alice Dalgliesh
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.
Frank Herbert
I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.
Holly Black
I survive at the edge of friends circles.
Holly Black
Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.
Julie Wilson
Efficiency was a higher priority than imagination.
Adam Christopher
It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: ‘To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.
Colin Duriez
If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.'(from "The Front and the Back Parts of the House", 1991)
William Maxwell
One kind of walking which I do not recall seeing mentioned anywhere in the literature of the subject is imaginary walking.
Edwin V. Mitchell
The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.
Will Schwalbe
I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters.
Sally Brampton
Life's full of surprises, and they ain't all bad.
Barbara Rogan
I wanted to putt my hand on this hand and hold it still under mine, made still by his made still. Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness on that ship; but we joined, for all good things in the world, and to find somethin together; and loved, I never knew I could do it and was afraid; and on the bow of the ship that night that he said, "What have we done Christy?"I said, wonderin too, "But somethin good will come of this, I know somethin good will come of this..."Only sorrow came.
William Goyen
We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.
Thomas Curtis Clark
Out of the starless night that covers me, (O tribulation of the wind that rolls!) Black as the cloud of some tremendous spell, The susurration of the sighing sea Sounds like the sobbing whisper of two souls That tremble in a passion of farewell.To the desires that trebled life in me, (O melancholy of the wind that rolls!) The dreams that seemed the future to foretell, The hopes that mounted herward like the sea, To all the sweet things sent on happy souls, I cannot choose but bid a mute farewell.And to the girl who was so much to me (O lamentation of this wind that rolls!) Since I may not the life of her compel, Out of the night, beside the sounding sea, Full of the love that might have blent our souls, A sad, a last, a long, supreme farewell.
William Ernest Henley
You cannot slay the illusion of the victim until you face it and call it truth
Deborah Brodie
What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.
Roger Angell
How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.
Peter De Vries
The graces are restless today. They pweet and muss, shuddering their wings so that the feathers stick out at defensive angles. I feel that restlessness too. When the sea is fractious like this – when it chutters and schwaks against the moorings, when it won't talk but only mumbles – it's difficult to think.
Kirsty Logan
It never ends, the bruiseof being
Kevin Young
Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it.As she realized that, his song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.
Holly Black
The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes...One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.
Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.” He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know. Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91
Brian Doyle
There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.
Frederick Barthelme
His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
William Maxwell
It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.
William Maxwell
The only way to end grief was to go through it.
Holly Black
Steven dreamed of you the very secondyou died(So the poem goes)and you may have visited himBut I'm pretty sure you don't believein poems
Jon Paul Fiorentino
He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.
Adam P. Knave
There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.
Brian Francis Slattery
Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn't bite down.
Kirsty Logan
We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.
Ander Monson
My Dad is everywhere and he is nowhere. My world tilts on a different axis, orbiting the sun of my own family- but still, I feel his warmth.
Elisabeth Egan
Pages burnt, memories buried, I wakeor think I'm awake. Or dreaming still?
Yong Shu Hoong
I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.p112-13
Brian Doyle
Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I'm seeing Anja... From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they're open or they're close, always I'm thinking on Anja.
Art Spiegelman
Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive even those who have committed barbaric acts. If Angulimala is capable of renouncing violence, then tell me, your Majesty: is your civilized society also capable of being truly civilized and renouncing violence?
Satish Kumar
I am so sorry. That we cannot go back to that moment and get you the help you needed, the information you wanted, the hope and love you craved. I am so sorry about what you’re learning now, what you’re seeing, what you’re reliving. Our culture didn’t let you mourn—we pretend you weren’t a parent, that you’re not. What’s hidden is laid bare. Know you’re loved and not judged. I’m so sorry the law let this happen. I’m so sorry we let this happen.
Kathryn Jean Lopez
When you hear the haunting melody of guilt and shame, drown it out with God's song of forgiveness and love.
Katy Kauffman
Within the moment of now, there is presence of ever there, As It is;, Invisible; Nothingness; of Still and silent awareness; in substratum; witnessing itself which U in real R...It has nothing to do with Your mind, Your body appearance and Your world...Wisdom is to let it recognize and and realize itself...Often in Ignorance of IT, ignorant start believing "In the Moment", "As It Is" words, which point towards IT (awareness), ignorantly for the appearing body, appearing mind and appearing creation...Be Happy and Keep Smiling...
Satish Kumar
Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why?
Frank Herbert
Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.
Jeff VanderMeer
He and the second wife must have made a very close, self-contained unit--two people moving through life as if in a thinly membraned bubble, venturing out separately for practical purposes but neither of them whole unless they were together. People who didn't need many friends or outside activities, who found complete fulfillment in each other.
Bill Pronzini
I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria.But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense.All friendships are negotiations of power.
Holly Black
In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off it's head, say. A test. Not a test of love. A test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.
Holly Black
We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.
Frank Herbert
How can trade be bad if you don’t make moneyeven when it’s good?” inquired Gleed, reasonablyapplying the information Harrison had given him.Jeff’s big moon eyes went over him slowly thenturned to Harrison. “So he’s another bum off yourboat, eh? What’s he talking about?”“Money,” explained Harrison. “It’s stuff we use tosimplify trade. It’s printed stuff, like documentaryobs of various sizes.”“That tells me a lot,” Jeff Baines observed. “Ittells a crowd that has to make a printed record ofevery ob is not to be trusted — because they don’teven trust each other.
Eric Frank Russell
It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.
Jeff VanderMeer
When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.
Noah Webster
I’d be glad to go out on a limb with thoseWho want nothing beyond what the wind bestows,Were I not bound to roots, dug in deep to bearNever being done grasping for light and air
X.J. Kennedy
I warn you, the trip will not be easy. Once you choose to walk in the light, your path will lead you places you do not want to go.
Dave Wolverton
Just remember, a dark shadow need light to exist but light doesn't need darkness to be luminous.
Gwen Hayes
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
I should have titled it "Diet Like Your Life Depended On It!" because it's about so much more than just beating Diabetes.
Russell Stamets
The fact is, inner peace isn't something that comes when you finally paint the whole house a nice shade of cream and start drinking herbal tea. Inner peace is something that is shaped by the wisdom that 'this too shall pass' and is fired in the kiln of self-knowledge...
Tania Ahsan
I remember loving pencils. I was fond of paper. I loved the small of textbooks. I loved the way the light from a desk lamp was bright on a page. I loved the smell of fresh-cut grass. It was a thing everybody loved, but there was no shame in being that much like everybody else, in sharing that.
Frederick Barthelme
We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose.” School—from pre-K to postdoc programs—exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues.
Marc Aronson
In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.
Bill Buford