Quotes by Editors - Page 9

A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.
Mark Samuels
There should be no crying in copyediting.
Carol Fisher Saller
This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.
Will Leitch
I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.
Lisa Mangum
We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.
Brian Doyle
If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users.
Christopher Bollen
The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.
Jeff VanderMeer
Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.
Alberto Manguel
Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Mary Ann Shaffer
She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.
T.E.D. Klein
Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
Alberto Manguel
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.
Alberto Manguel
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Alberto Manguel
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
Alberto Manguel
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Stewart Brand
But ask us to prove even to ourselves we are right in our belief, and we are in a quandary.
J.W. Sire
We're all just wandering around with our fingers crossed, hoping we'll meet someone who will make our lostness a little less lonely.
Alanna Rusnak
We distance ourselves for protection,Wear scarves when it’s cold. What seems most outlandish in our autobiography Is what really happened.
Steve Abbott
(Remember you always have the option of taking to the sea.)
Mallory Ortberg
It’s a grace feather. See how its colors shift from green to blue, like the sea? It means remembrance. It shows that no distance, no amount of water between two people, will make them forget. Someone gave it to say that they remembered you.
Kirsty Logan
[I]f the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.
Noah Webster
For even though the rest of the city--no, the rest of the country--starved and searched fruitlessly for work and slept in a humpy in the park, society's finest could still squander their money however they saw fit.The unemployed, they would say, were lazy. If they worked harder, they'd do as well as Mr. Harry Moneypants was doing, who'd earned his vast fortune by having the foresightedness of selecting rich parents, who had, in their time, also cleverly selected rich parents.
Justine Larbalestier
After all, it’s pretty hard to be prejudiced against blacks and gays when you’re a-okay with Klingons and the Green Men of Mars.
Lou Anders
There was no one to blame but the mighty, ruthless stranger. Thus was complexity reduced to demonology, which is a defining feature of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, or, indeed, any "anti-ism.
Josef Joffe
Simplicity is the most difficult of all concepts.
Brian Herbert
True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart.
Albert Ellery Bergh
Jesus, Samara Jane, do you fuck your girlfriend with that mouth?” She tugs my lip between her teeth. “Only when she’s good.
Dahlia Adler
When we love God in sincerity and with consistency, He gives us the desires of our heart. And as we love Him how we should be loving Him, our desires are somehow supernaturally conformed to be His desires for us! So, love God, with all that you are in all truth and devotion, and He will reward you according to His will. This is not something that we are capable of by ourselves, but God is faithful to give His chosen ones victory!
Rachel Walden
It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.
Ford Madox Ford
How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.
Diana Athill
An ally in time of need is worth more than gold.(Lady Rose quoting Scholar Tan)
Michael Pryor
Hard tasks need hard ways.
Frank Herbert
Like hot foodI love youlike warmbread & coldcuts, buttersammichesor, days later, afterThanksgivingwhen I wantwhatever's left
Kevin Young
Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.
Frank Herbert
If we lost everything except for the clothes we stood up in, would we turn to each other and think....How lucky we really were?
Jacqueline Kennedy
Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary. -- Margaret Cousins
Margaret Cousins
And this is how I come face to face with my selfishness, because I don't know if I can enjoy this goldfish without knowing that he loves me, or if not loves me, then at least depends on me, i.e., swims up to my fingers greedily when I fill them with salty-smelling rainbow-colored flakes, and wiggle them over his head.And this is disturbing to realize, that I have such difficulty enjoying anything that doesn't know I exist. Especially when I stop and think how big the world is, the world that is not even Japan or India, the world that is the room next door.
Amy Fusselman
Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.
Frank Herbert
The hardest thing about being wanted was the hardest thing about wanting—wanting badly enough that it gave you stomachache, wanting in a way that was partly about kissing and partly about swallowing whole, the way a snake gulps down a mouse or the Big Bad Wolf gulps down Red Riding Hood—wanting turned someone you felt like you knew into a stranger. Whether that person was your brother’s best friend or a sleeping prince in a glass prison or a girl who kissed you at a party, the moment you wanted more than just touching your mouth to theirs they became terrifying and you became terrified.
Holly Black
It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.
Alfred Bester
[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?
Frank Harris
I’ve got to stop this. Stop worrying about the why. Stop forcing what was happening into the realm of impossible. Stop hiding behind excuses. Stop being afraid to step out on faith.
Deatri King-Bey
The thing about Americans,” she said, “is that you’re very concerned about everything all the time.
Will Schwalbe
Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
Frank Herbert
I’ve attempted to bring together as many perspectives as possible, not in order to be exhaustive–but to celebrate the many different approaches to appreciating Shakespeare that there are possible
Susannah Carson
Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)
Susannah Carson
Everybody needs a career manager."- Lady Macbeth
Robert Lynn Asprin
It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are
Cid Corman
Verlange. The process feels like crossing a border on a one-way ticket, from a state of innocence, to one of irreconcilable knowledge. You are in a new country. But no one wants to live here. The visas are assigned by some obscure system nobody can comprehend.
Karina Szczurek
The correspondence testifies to the frailty of human longings, to the process of how something precious can turn fatal, a reality become illusion. We are reminded that love should be cherished when it comes your way, because no matter in what form it arrives, carrying no matter what baggage in its fragile beautiful hands, you should welcome it and protect it from the harshness of this world.
Karina Szczurek
I couldn't pick just one.The moment I'd touched the sugar packet, a thousand thoughts cascaded through my
Lisa Mangum
By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.
Asti Hustvedt
The bloody times, the horror, will just be history to them, words on a page, so how will they dare to judge? Very easily, I should imagine.
Storm Constantine
There is a danger in exposing yourself to too much vapid art. It can weaken your judgment and erode your sensibilities, until the time comes when you see things that are merely passable, and somehow think that they’re good.
David Farland
When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.
Sally Brampton
Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.
Sally Brampton
admitted I was powerless over food,that my life had become uninhabitable.Sure, there are folks who speak of livesunmanageable, but my life was always that!It took more to push me to the admission.I had a Hell Year when I turned 50and it took me another ten to reach the crevice,to fall off the edge, to give up and gowhere a counselor had directed me for years,to the rooms of recovery. I knew she was rightbut I wasn’t broken enough to go. Unmanageable,I could life in. Uninhabitable I couldn’t.I fought it for nigh on sixty yearsbut when I finally couldn’t keep on pretending,continue making do, I found what I needed,what I could finally accept, and soar out of thereto recovery.
Barbara B. Rollins
The paths that lead to the crossroads of life; otherwise known as "transition”, seem the longest, and darkest. This is a result of the tension present between struggle and grace. The more you resist, the more anxiety and stress you will encounter. Whereas, when you let go of the expectation of where you should be, or want to be, and accept the current situation, event, or circumstance, to merely exist, you will experience God’s sufficient Grace.
Deborah Brodie