Quotes by Editors - Page 32

Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals.
David Ebershoff
There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later.
Daniel José Older
It's time, my childrenWhen the waves rise high When the waters run deepWhen the clock strikes midnightYou'll feel the mark of Zero HourAnd you'll never be the same again
Lisa Mangum
While it is easy to blame the hand of the abuser, when that hand no longer is raised against you, why do you continue to feel the burn of its touch?
Deborah Brodie
In real life, couples bond and war over a million different things. The causes of divorce are like beautiful, unique snowflakes.
Howard Mittelmark
But when thou findest sensibility of heart, joined with softness of manners, an accomplished mind, and religion, united with sweetness of temper, modest deportment, and a love of domestic life; such is the woman who will divide the sorrows and double the joys of thy life. Take her to thyself; she is worthy to be thy nearest friend, thy companion, the wife of thy bosom.
Noah Webster
Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.
Philip Zaleski
True Love… it’s the most wonderful human emotion and one of the most elusive. We search for it, trying to find that one person in the whole world worthy enough to spend our lives with. When you look at the trail of broken hearts, the rivers of tears and the broken dreams, it’s quite obvious that it’s not an easy dream to achieve. Don’t we rightly call it the Quest for Love? That’s why when we think we’ve found the right person, we are giddy with happiness and relief. Finally! The answer to our prayers has come after such a long wait. We are safe. We are loved.A lot of women view marriage this way and I blame that on all the Walt Disney cartoons we watched as little girls. There’s this beautiful helpless princess locked away in a castle and here comes this handsome prince to save her from her miserable life. Classic. Then, after the grand wedding ball, the movie ends with:“And They Lived Happily Ever After.”That’s it? What happened afterwards? Nothing’s mentioned about that. We are made to think that it all ends there, that the couple’s happiness is secured and a given. They love each other, right? They went through all that trouble just to be together. So they’ll be happy. End of story.
Eeva Lancaster
A person's character is but half formed till after wedlock.
Charles Simmons
[Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes
S.T. Joshi
Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears as little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog.
Zinzi Clemmons
She was the curator of her marriage, collector of swift quotes and unremarked-upon sensations.
Laura Furman
Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.
Adam Ross
Marriage can bore you but there is a fortitude that comes from it, too. When you need to lean on it, you are so thankful that you can.
Ellen Tien
The notion that women shouldn't care about personal success -- or the work that gets them there -- is disengenuous; it is impossible for women not to have jobs anymore, so it doesn't make sense to expect them to structure their lives around getting married. The real failure is our cultural incapacity to make room for women to live and thrive outside of traditional conceptions of femininity and relationships. After all, we can eat without marriage, but not without work.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Like most marriages, ours eventually wore down all the cartilage. We were a hip needing replacement. Bone on bone, grinding, day in and day out. It worked but it was hard.
Frederick Barthelme
...in response to whatever Alice was struggling with, whatever had caused her to withdraw from him, he had chosen the arms of another woman instead of relying on his own fortitude, as if he'd somehow deserved more comfort than Alice herself had been able to give, or not. Which was part of marriage, after all, part of the vows: enduring those times. And this sense of entitlement seemed to him an even greater sin than infidelity.
Adam Ross
It is possible, he thought, to be completely happy in marriage--though you must be willing to hold on when your ship was lost at sea and there was no guarantee of rescue.
Adam Ross
What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.
Frederick Barthelme
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.
Mary Ann Shaffer
There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there's nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witness them, and feel some deep ache that such things arrive, and must be endured, with wordless aching all around.
Brian Doyle
Each person is alone with his pain, even when others share the same fate.
Dorthe Binkert
I don’t want my pain blanked out, he thought to himself; I need to keep my pain. It is a part of who I am, every bit as integral as the joy I’ve felt.
Mark Samuels
Pain becomes proud because it believes no one else understands.
Marshall Segal
Toward dawn we shared with youyour hour of desolation,the huge lingering passionof your unearthly out cry,as you swung your blind headtowards us and laboriously openeda bloodshot, glistening eye,in which we swam with terror and recognition.
Stanley Kunitz
By portraying war as an opportunity for virtuous acts, the politicians romanticize evil.
Sheldon Richman
In a dark placein a dark timestart with black.Stop. Soak up its energy.Remember the circlehowever bent and broken.Prize balance. Seek Pleasure.Allow surprise. Let musicguide your every impulse.Support those who falter.Steer by our fixed star:No Justice, No Peace.
Jim Haba
...literary translators are the interpreters of human values - and the true peacemakers.
Margaret Obank
There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.
William George Jordan
The horse is by Nature a very lazy animal whose idea of heaven is an enormous field of lush grass in which he can graze undisturbed until his belly is full, and after a pleasant doze can start filling himself up all over again.
Elwyn Hartley Edwards
He is only one of a million no, a billion stories you could tell about the living beings on just this side of the mountain. The fact is that there are more stories in the space of a single second, in a single square foot of dirt and air and water, then we could tell in a hundred years. The word amazing isn't much of a word for how amazing it is. The fact is that there are more stories in the world than there are fish in the sea or birds in the air or lies among politicians. You could be sad at how many stories go untold, but you could also be delighted at how many stories we catch and share in delight and wonder and astonishment and illumination and sometimes even epiphany.
Brian Doyle
It didn’t matter that she didn’t live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn’t happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips.
Rebecca Brooks
Nature has wrought with a bolder hand in America.
Nathaniel Parker Willis
What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, - what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself...to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! What is the echo of roofs...or or aisles that pealed the anthems of painted pomp, to the silence that has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken.
Charles Fenno Hoffman
Rockface sheer and imposing, emerges from the sea, reminding us nature makes no allowances.
Marcia Meier
These days I live in a magical little village on Dartmoor in Devon, England, and my "special spot" is a moss-covered rock in a circle of trees in the woods behind my house.I often go into the woods, or walk through the fields and hills nearby, when I need inspiration, or to work out a plot problem, or come up with an idea. I think better on my feet, particularly when there is beautiful countryside around me and a dog at my side.When I was younger and lived in big cities, I had special places there too. There's magic everywhere, if you look.
Terri Windling
Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.
Siobhan Vivian
We strike our blow, even as Pierre has said. We strike at the coppice that you so desire. We strike there because it is the very heart of the forest. There the secret life of the forest runs at full tide. We know - and you know! Something that, destroyed, will take the heart out of the forest - will make it know us for its masters."("Women Of The Woods")
Abraham Grace Merritt
All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we’re a lawyer, an artist or a police officer.
Robert Wringham
With today’s technology, social attitudes and appetite for self-actualisation, we’d ideally look upon our work with a sense of pride, involvement and accomplishment. But we’re rarely given the chance. Instead, we pretend to love our jobs with an almost idiotic zeal, while being secretly exhausted and insulted by them.
Robert Wringham
And love is work. But it's the best kind of work there is.
Sammy Nickalls
..it's not how much you work, but how working so much makes you feel that counts. And how I felt was iserable.
Jonathon Lazear
Travel wasn't fun if you didn't get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.
Chris Pavone
Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses
Frank Herbert
Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.
Frank Harris
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.
Kevin Kelly
A dog has one aim in life... to bestow his heart.
J.R. Ackerley
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
Joseph Epstein
History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)
Kat Georges
When it was all overthe centuries startedto roll by and history was writtenby thosewith no storiesmisery turned into myth and figures of speech played catalyst to happiness
Bänoo Zan
I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men —even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses.
K. Lee Lerner
Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "stillbelieve in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand.
Robert Shea
we refer to the Middle Ages as ages of faith; a time in which men believed a heavenly Jerusalem above the sky much as they believed an earthly Sion beyond the sea; when the whole of their thought was of a piece with their theology...those were days when a thoughtful soul here or there could realize some unity of mental vision. The fact should be admitted, however we regard it - whether as the stultifying tyranny of dogma or as an enviable single-mindedness; an ideal too easily realized, no doubt, in a plentiful dearth of empirical knowledge, and yet establishing a standard after which perplexed modernity may strive.
Jocelyn Gibb
Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]
Simon Bradley
History is the hidden map of who, where and how we are today.
Elena Lappin
The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.
Shirley Abbott
He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.
Brian Francis Slattery
Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?
Leonid Borodin