Quotes by Editors - Page 8

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero
Frank Herbert
Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.
Philip Zaleski
The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man...As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women's attainment of better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Do your part to help reap a harvest, and trust God to do His part.
Katy Kauffman
A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted."No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die."Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.
Holly Black
I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.
Jeff VanderMeer
We took our food order to go, in greasy paper bags, and walked across Columbus Circle to Central Park. He helped me up the giant prehistoric-looking rock just off the playground.
Camille Perri
They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.
Sari Botton
And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.
Willie Morris
New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.
Ford Madox Ford
New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic "growing up" while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love the quieter, slower, nature-rich life I live now in the sheep-dotted hills of Devon, there are ways in which I still feel more truly myself here in New York, more than anywhere else. Even after all this time in the desert and on Dartmoor. Strange, isn't it?
Terri Windling
Early Summer, loveliest season,The world is being colored in.While daylight lasts on the horizon,Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos."Welcome, summer" is what he says.Winter's unimaginable.The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.Summer means the river's shallow,Thirsty horses nose the pools.Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.White bog cotton droops in bloom.Swallows swerve and flicker up.Music starts behind the mountain.There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.The speckled fish jumps; and the strongSwift warrior is up and running.A little, jumpy, chirpy fellowHits the highest note there is;The lark sings out his clear tidings.Summer, shimmer, perfect days.
Marie Heaney
A winner has more skills than a loser," Vor said, "no matter how you define the competition.
Brian Herbert
...it has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else.
Howard Mittelmark
From the first she showed a curious sensitivity to what, I suppose, may be called the 'influences' of the place. She said it 'smelled' of ghosts and warlocks.
Abraham Grace Merritt
The princess turns to him, serious. 'You are the one my great-grandfather spoke of: a denizen of Earth wearing a dirty apron who falls down a shaft and lands in sticky goo to lead the Brundeedle race out of Woe Time.':
Eric Laster
Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.
Scott Kaelen
It could be a work of art among vendettas
Frank Herbert
He glared at Lucian in the manner of birds, first peering through one eye and then turning his head to peer through the other, apparently finding both views equally loathsome.
Rachel Swirsky
But the Butlerians turn fear into violence and panic into a weapon. By creating imaginary problems and raising the specter of nonexistent enemies, they transform common people into a wild herd that destroys everything they do not understand.
Brian Herbert
There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head
Damon Knight
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
Sally Brampton
Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.
Kate Bernheimer
He was furious with himself for having lived these last days on a wish. On a lie. A kiss does not make the future. Love alone does not make a life.
Alethea Kontis
All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
But life is not a fairy tale. It's brighter and darker, longer and briefer, duller and more magical. It's full of contradictions, but one thing it's not is neat.
Kirsty Logan
This is what happens, when things are not quite a fairy tale.You go into the woods to find your story. If you are brave, if you are fortunate, you walk out of them to find your life.
Kat Howard
This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far.
Kat Howard
Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.
Kate Bernheimer
Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose.
Terri Windling
Silence is another element we find in classic fairy tales — girls muted by magic or sworn to silence in order to break enchantment. In "The Wild Swans," a princess is imprisoned by her stepmother, rolled in filth, then banished from home (as her older brothers had been before her). She goes in search of her missing brothers, discovers that they've been turned into swans, whereupon the young girl vows to find a way to break the spell. A mysterious woman comes to her in a dream and tells her what to do: 'Pick the nettles that grow in graveyards, crush and spin them into thread, then weave them into coats and throw them over your brothers' backs.' The nettles burn and blister, yet she never falters: picking, spinning, weaving, working with wounded, crippled hands, determined to save her brothers. All this time she's silent. 'You must not speak,' the dream woman has warned, 'for a single world will be like a knife plunged into your brothers' hearts.'You must not speak. That's what my stepfather said: don't speak, don't cry, don't tell. That's what my mother said as well, as we sat in hospital waiting rooms -- and I obeyed, as did my brothers. We sat as still and silent as stone while my mother spun false tales to explain each break and bruise and burn. Our family moved just often enough that her stories were fresh and plausible; each new doctor believed her, and chided us children to be more careful. I never contradicted those tales. I wouldn't have dared, or wanted to. They'd send me into foster care. They'd send my young brothers away. And so we sat, and the unspoken truth was as sharp as the point of a knife.
Terri Windling
To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. Disney's well–known film version of the story, released in 1937, was ostensibly based on the German tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Originally titled "Snow–drop" and published in Kinder–und Hausmarchen in 1812, the Grimms' "Snow White" is a darker, chillier story than the musical Disney cartoon, yet it too had been cleaned up for publication, edited to emphasize the good Protestant values held by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. (...) Variants of Snow White were popular around the world long before the Grimms claimed it for Germany, but their version of the story (along with Walt Disney's) is the one that most people know today. Elements from the story can be traced back to the oldest oral tales of antiquity, but the earliest known written version was published in Italy in 1634.
Terri Windling
Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.
Terri Windling
Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl...there was a boy...there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did...and what he did...and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did...and why one failed...and why another triumphed in the end. And I know that it's true, because I danced at their wedding and drank their very best wine.
Terri Windling
Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.
Terri Windling
Whether this blood was daemon, human, or something else, it was still only blood, and blood was only the ink of life.
Gabrielle Harbowy
Mystic grimoirs, walking corpses... I'm so far out of my wheelhouse that I might as well be on the moon.
Mark Waid
[Discipline i]t’s the ability to overcome the urge to grab the bright and shiny and interesting to finish what you’ve started.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul.
Herbert S. Gaskill
It is an unfortunate fact that proofs can be very misleading. Proofs exist to establish once and for all, according to very high standards, that certain mathematical statements are irrefutable facts. What is unfortunate about this is that a proof, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly correct, does not in any way have to be enlightening. Thus, mathematicians, and mathematics students, are faced with two problems: the generation of proofs, and the generation of internal enlightenment. To understand a theorem requires enlightenment. If one has enlightenment, one knows in one's soul why a particular theorem must be true.
Herbert S. Gaskill
Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes.
Frank Herbert
Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.
John Bartlett
There are no heroes and there are no villains. There are just opposing points of view. That's all history is...the viciously long battle between world views.
Peter J. Tomasi
Mutually assured destruction.
Holly Black
But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.
Mary Ann Shaffer
You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.
Holly Black
Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.
Cliff Fadiman
He didn't want to get his hopes up, but he also refused to be a pessimist about this moment. Everything could go either way.
Adam P. Knave
One moment of incompetence can be fatal.
Frank Herbert
I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.
Holly Black
He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!
Ford Madox Ford
In adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and, let us hope, we remember how to change back.
Brian Herbert
The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
Frank Herbert
Fame clearly breeds a false sense of security.
Eric Reynolds
The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.
Frank Herbert
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?16. What do you value most in a friendship?17. What is your most treasured memory?18. What is your most terrible memory?19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?20. What does friendship mean to you?21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
The New York Times
Good books often answer questions you didn't even know you wanted to ask.
Will Schwalbe
He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask.
Frank Herbert