Quotes by Editors - Page 38

For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the su
Deborah Garrison
A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.
Philip Zaleski
Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.
Philip Zaleski
Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.
Philip Zaleski
Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Childhood years are vital to our total existence. Overloading the child with too much memory oriented learning and formal writing can cripple a child’s sense of wonder. There should be creativity, a ‘Free Progress’ – each child developing and flowering in an absolutely spontaneous, inwardly centered and self directed process. A school makes a break through if it creates a learning environment but it is a parent to make an active choice for kids and to nurture their talents. It is in their hands to recognize their potentialities and offer them an Alternative Education, a commitment, hard work, responsibility, learning the basic skills of reading and writing at own pace with creativity and open minds in open surroundings in tune to environment, blooming naturally!
Ilaxi Patel
Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.
Edward Fiske
To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
Wendy Priesnitz
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
Frank Herbert
Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.
Floyd Dell
No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.
George Seldes
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
Frank Herbert
One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
Frank Herbert
Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.
Charles Platt
Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one’s character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job.
Robert Wringham
[To admit that college isn't for everyone] may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of young adults that their futures depend on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs. The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it.
Ramesh Ponnuru
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
Shirley Abbott
...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....
The New York Times
In the new century science will defeat famine, boredom, and the plague, but . . . vital knowledge will become so elevated that nobody will know how anything works. . . . the good news is that everybody will be empowered; the bad news is nobody will understand why.
Mark Christensen
The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.
Noah Webster
What an author doesn't know could fill a book.
Holly Black
But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.
Art Spiegelman
Edward believes that all religions are cousins at heart and begin in the right spirit but then they are corrupted by the desire for power.
Brian Doyle
Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!
Ray Russell
The very fact that 'the mystical' is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes toward power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision!
Richard King
The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.“Nothing about religion is simple.
Frank Herbert
The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.
David Ebershoff
Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.
Frank Herbert
Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Frank Herbert
In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.
Frank Herbert
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
Frank Herbert
But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.
Frank Herbert
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
Frank Herbert
They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
Frank Herbert
You believe in God?" demanded Billy Karma."I believe in thirty-seven separate and distinct gods," answered Argyle proudly. "That puts me thirty-six ahead of you.""It makes you a pagan.""It makes you a man of limited vision," said Argyle.
Mike Resnick
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
Frank Herbert
Blind cat jumps with faith you should too.
Marcia Meier
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
Ish #177 "You never know what you don't know, until you finally know it.
Regina Griffin
Ish #28 "Give you child a name with meaning.
Regina Griffin
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.
Holly Black
Beauty and grace command the world.
Park Benjamin
Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.
Roberta Gellis
Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
Howard Mittelmark
For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.
Terri Windling
A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
Howard Mittelmark
Writer: It's not an occupation it's a compulsion.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden
It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
Ross Wetzsteon
Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don't think it's necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, "running away to Bordertown" is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren't just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who "runs away" from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us "run away" to college . . . or we "run away" to a distant city or state . . . or we "run away" from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We "run away" from places we don't belong, or from families we have never fit into. We "run away" to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of "running away from home"—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you're in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the "magic" that lights the way. she "founded")
Terri Windling
Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.
Margaret Jean Langstaff
Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.
Julia Bell
Less is more.
William Zinsser
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
In older myths, the dark road leads downward into the Underworld, where Persephone is carried off by Hades, much against her will, while Ishtar descends of her own accord to beat at the gates of Hell. This road of darkness lies to the West, according to Native American myth, and each of us must travel it at some point in our lives. The western road is one of trials, ordeals, disasters and abrupt life changes — yet a road to be honored, nevertheless, as the road on which wisdom is gained. James Hillman, whose theory of 'archetypal psychology' draws extensively on Greco–Roman myth, echoes this belief when he argues that darkness is vital at certain periods of life, questioning our modern tendency to equate mental health with happiness. It is in the Underworld, he reminds us, that seeds germinate and prepare for spring. Myths of descent and rebirth connect the soul's cycles to those of nature.
Terri Windling
Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.
Heywood Broun
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.
Patricia T. O'Conner
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly