Quotes by Editors - Page 3

An ally in time of need is worth more than gold.(Lady Rose quoting Scholar Tan)

Michael Pryor

I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure: try to please everybody.

Herbert Bayard Swope

Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Half effort does not produce half results. It produces no results. Work continuous work and hard work is the only way to accomplish results that last.

Hamilton Holt

A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?

Sally Brampton

Tommy and I put on a radio play to entertain everyone while they unpacked their cookies. It was about a girl who saves up money for a prom dress, but at the last minute she says, "It's only clothes," and buys war bonds instead. The play was a big success, and my whole school pledged to buy war bonds, which should have made me happy. But it gave me a queer feeling; it's easy to write propaganda when everyone agrees with you. Do you understand? I think I'd rather bake cookies; it feels more honest. Your friend, LuluSammy looked down at me. "A girl after your own heart!" he said. "In my experience it is a rare female who can say, 'It's only clothes,' and when the war came, you discovered who you really were. Women changed. Children grew up overnight. I wonder what happened to this one.

Ruth Reichl

Having experimented in both poetry and prose, I can say that the two are such loaded words. But neither are quite as weighted as the word “poet”. I think some people can write poetry their whole lives, and never truly BE a “poet”. Whereas I see poets in the wanderers I encounter, the baristas who serve me, and the truckers I, so, love to talk to.To be a poet in my humble opinion is to be a muse of the human experience. I love that I love the idea, that anything can be poetry, it can’t be defined. It’s a feeling, like punk rock. I’m not one for form or structure. I say if your words are visceral and honest, it’s poetry. If you see the beauty of the world and humanity, and you preach it, you’re a poet.

Mallory Smart

I really love folklore. I had read a lot of faerie folklore that informed the books I wrote. I also really love vampire folklore; my eighth grade research paper was on [it]. [With this project,] it was really helpful to think about the way you can use language. When you're writing about faeries, you can't call anyone "fey"; there are certain words that become forbidden because they're actualized in what faeries do. When you write about vampires, you could think the same way about things like the word "red" or "hunger"--it's interesting to think of the ways that the words have double meanings, or different meanings that shifted.

Holly Black

Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.

Sally Brampton

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

Peggy O'Mara

The Gelaming regarded themselves as a force for good, and in many ways they were, but they were also inexorable and their compassion could often feel like oppression.

Storm Constantine

He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

Frank Herbert

To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.

Henry Hewes

They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

Frank Herbert

A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil--of people passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices--of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray's rhythmic death--of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work--of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller's court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell--of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold the devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!

Abraham Grace Merritt

A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.

Hazel Butler

Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays. - Coco Chanel

Justine Picardie

They fail and they alone who have not striven.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

M.V. Carey

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Alberto Manguel

If Blake thought she was going to be some meek, mealy-mouthedpushover grateful for his dick and his non-apologies, he obviously didn’t know what it took to make a room full of tenth graders pay attention.

Rebecca Brooks

The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.

Brian Herbert

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

Ben Greenman

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

Adam Langer

On the day after Christmas, some store or another will always take out and ad saying there are only 364 shopping days to Christmas. No one is amused.

Gerard Del Re

Some things exist whether you believe in them or not

Holly Black

I do not fully understand the way of human beings. They are a curious and remarkable tribe altogether. They are capable of anything. I know that much. They are a constant surprise to me. They are a constant surprise to themselves also. They appear to live in a state of constant amazement. This makes them refreshing and infuriating. But there is a greatness about them sometimes. More perhaps than they know. Or a capacity for greatness. More than they know. It’s confusing but I know this to be true. I have learned that much in all these years.

Brian Doyle

The kiss was so soft she couldn’t believe this was the same bad boy who’d said such things to her with that mouth.

Rebecca Brooks

My second meeting with Vincent Starrett began on a cool Sunday afternoon in May of 1962. After a short interlude, he returned from the kitchen precariously balancing a large cup of tea on a very small saucer. It was the largest tea cup I had ever seen, large enough to startle, I am inclined to suspect, even the Mad Hatter in 'Alice in Wonderland.

Peter Ruber

Oh- and grab the plastic bag over by my suitcase."I slug down the last of the coffee and get up. The bag contains panty hose. I put them on her desk."They're for you.""You want me to look homeless, desperate, but also kind of fabulous?

Holly Black

Pain becomes proud because it believes no one else understands.

Marshall Segal

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

Edgar Watson Howe

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam.

Frank Herbert

As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.

Franz Rottensteiner

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

Jonathan Rosen

What makes the engine go?Desire, desire, desire.

Stanley Kunitz

Anyone who offers their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.

Holly Black

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

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their own.

Naveed Saleh

[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw!

J.R. Ackerley

...every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.

Adam Langer

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be

Holly Black

To try to pray is to pray. You can't fail at it. It's the only human endeavor I can think of where trying is doing. Reaching out is holding on. Joining in is letting go.

Rick Hamlin

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

Frank Herbert

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Charles Péguy

It is the absoluteness of meaninglessness that Christianity, as I understand it, inhabits and inflects, the shock and stark violence of the cross that discloses the living Christ. Revelation, like creation, arises not merely out of nothingness but by means of it.

Christian Wiman

A torch-light procession marching down your throat.

John L. O'Sullivan

There are four things that make a man fight as you just did," the duke explained to Rumbold. "Love, despair, anger, or insanity."Erik counted them off on his fingers. "Everything to lose, nothing to lose, someone's taken it, or you've lost it.

Alethea Kontis

On a morning like this, fear is a blue sky emptied of birds.

Fran Wilde

Wetenschap is wat wetenschappers doen - Science is what scientists do.

Dennis Flanagan

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

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

Wendy Lesser

It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?

Damon Knight

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

Art Spiegelman

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

Christopher Bollen

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

Frank Herbert

It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they’d been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country

Will Schwalbe

Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas he sees his picture mentally.... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting what do you see? ... Is the picture one you think worth painting? ... You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.

Thomas Dreier

I believe I am becoming pathetic. I'll go further, I believe that I am in love with a flower-growing, wood-carving quarryman/carpenter/pig farmer. In fact, I know I am. Perhaps tomorrow I will become entirely miserable at the thought that he doesn't love me back - may, even, care for Remy- but at this precise moment I am succumbing to euphoria. My head and stomach feel quite odd.

Mary Ann Shaffer

The Sons of the Serpent - they want you angry. At the world. They need us all to feel like victims. And it's an easy get, because times suck. Every day is a battle. We all feel like we're on the wrong end of the wrecking ball. We feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and that makes us scared. And that's rocket fuel for S.O.B.'s like the Serpents. They prey on us when we're frightened. They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street, or the food stamp family next door. They encourage us to turn our fear into rage, and we fall for it because it's 'empowering.' Except it's not. We don't become 'empowered.' We become weaponized.

Mark Waid

No woman ever falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves.

Edgar Watson Howe

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