Quotes by Editors - Page 28

For this decision, too, he had submitted to the overwhelming force of Sharon’s personality, whose longings and needs seemed inalienable rights, whereas Marcus’s were merely whims.
Panio Gianopoulos
You said you were allowed to lose it,' some part of her reminded herself. 'Not yet, not yet.
Holly Black
Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No." "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him.
Holly Black
In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
Holly Black
please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Holly Black
I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Holly Black
Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?
Holly Black
Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.
Holly Black
Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.
Holly Black
Be careful," Aidan called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do." "We all know what you'd do, though, don't we?
Holly Black
Are you sure?" Aidan asked, "Gavriel's still a vampire." "He warned me about you and about them. He didn't have to. I'm not going to repay that by-" she hesitated, then frowned. "What did you call him?" "That's his name," Aidan sighed, "Gavriel. The other vampires, while they were tying me to the bed, they said his name." "Oh." With a final tug she pulled the blanked free and tossed it over to 'Gavriel
Holly Black
I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.
Holly Black
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
I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.
Ander Monson
Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance, is more like what we have in mind.
The editors n+1
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
Wendy Lesser
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.
Wendy Lesser
If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.
Lorin Stein
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
James W. Sire
When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.
Wendy Lesser
To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.
X.J. Kennedy
Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.
Philip Zaleski
Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.
Jocelyn Gibb
I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. [about The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
I see the process of reaching out, sharing yourself, communicating, establishing contact between two people as similar to, if not the same as, the interaction between two people entering a relationship in literature – that is, as reader and writer. Both seem to have the same astounding possibilities and the same terrible pitfalls. But if you battle through and souls touch, magic happens. Love. We feel more human, more alive, more understood, naked and yet protected from the cold of isolation and indifference. Our loneliness is, temporarily, held at bay.
Karina Szczurek
As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
Ross Wetzsteon
Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.
Asti Hustvedt
The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.
Asti Hustvedt
That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?
Peter Washington
Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
Frank Herbert
My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!
Frank Herbert
When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities — a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism — nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.
Christian Wiman
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an 'intelligent creator' should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools. Religiously inclined writers like Stephen L Carter may plead that 'respect' should be accorded to religious views in public discourse, but he neglects to demonstrate that those views are worthy of respect. All secularists -- scientists, literary figures, even politicians (if there are any such with the requisite courage) -- should speak out on the issue when the opportunity presents itself.
S.T. Joshi
An ever-growing, ever-constant relationship with God makes us certain of what we believe and enables us to run with endurance.
Katy Kauffman
We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. And not simply glimpsed—because certainly revelation is available outside of dogma; indeed all dogma, if it’s alive at all, is the result of revelation at one time or another—but gathered in. Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery—those moments when we suddenly know there is a God, about whom we “know” absolutely nothing—accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.
Christian Wiman
I'm looking for something new to believe in that isn't the way people yearn at night in the city.
Constance Renfrow
The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.
Frank Herbert
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
Frank Herbert
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Frank Herbert
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?
Frank Herbert
It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.
Frank Herbert
...in my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books.
Lisa Factora-Borchers
...if it was scandalous for girls in the 1960s to wear pants to school, what else will we look back on & shake our heads at? What else can't we see in the future? And at that, what else can we dream up?
Lisa Factora-Borchers
One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one's innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.("The Tower")
Mark Samuels
A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
Frank Herbert
The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.
Frank Herbert
Your future is your own again. And I consider that to be a happy ending to the story.
Lisa Mangum
Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability
Kevin Kelly
Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.("Talking In The Dark")
Dennis Etchison
Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.
Alethea Kontis
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.
Sean O'Faolain
She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.
Diana Athill
The charming king of Arilland had fallen in love at first sight. There was no question he would soon take this beautiful stranger as his bride.Fate had brought them together. Destiny. It was intoxicating.
Alethea Kontis
How can I possibly stop loving you when it's sort of predestined? — Malcom Lowry to Carol Brown, 1926 (age 16)
David Eso
Five Truths About Your Inner Voice:1. It is here, always available, wherever you are, however you feel, whatever you have done.2. It is solely on your side.3. It knows what's absolutely right for you.4. It is your friend, your ally, your guide, your ultimate supporter. 5. It is always with you and for you. Whenever you're feeling perplexed, uneasy, anxious, mad, frustrated, sick, or any other other way you don't want to feel, ask your Inner Voice. Listen.
Noelle Sterne
Men who pride themselves on being shrewd in discovering the weak points, the vanity, the dishonesty, immorality, intrigue, and pettiness of others think they understand character. They know only a part of character. They know only the depths to which some men may sink; they know not the heights to which some men may rise.
William George Jordan
What the edge of Truth cuts, the edge of Grace mends.
Deborah Brodie