"The stories, they get misconstrued as the facts aren’t really facts and the fictions aren’t really fictions. Sometimes, the people telling the stories aren’t who they appear to be. Sometimes, the voices sound the same and you never really know where they’re coming from. And sometimes, the same person just keeps telling the same story, over and over until he’s sick in the head."

"People aren’t stupid. They just want to believe in others. They just want to believe that the world isn’t coming to an end. And more importantly, they just want to believe in themselves. They want to believe that they can still trust their fellow human being to do the right thing."

"Make believe is much more entertaining and enjoyable than real life. More fantastical things can happen in make believe."

"I don’t need to be motivated to write; it’s always there waiting to get out. Published or not."

"My favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk. I’d never been a big reader, often going long stretches without reading. Then I read Fight Club (novel)."

"Swingers are gross, they’re always ugly people. But the idea of sleeping with a married man, she says, that’s so trendy. You are so hip."

"I try not to look up to people who are Filipino for the sake of their nationality. There seems to be a shortage of diversity in the arts in general, including publishing, so whenever I see a person of color doing something to further their culture or cause I tend to root for them."

"You can’t lead bunny lives and write tiger poetry."

"If we can get more stories and people who can make differences, such as authors writing OwnVoices stories, I think we’ll begin to see a shift in industries that can depict people of color in a more positive light."

"The most Filipino thing about me is the way I look. Having grown up essentially in American culture, for the longest time I’d identified first as an American and second as a Filipino."

"So the biggest lesson for me was to write what you want. People are going to have their opinions—good and bad. The reality is you’re not going to please everyone, and if you attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. If anything, you can have fun doing it."

"I’ve always looked at life through the lens of a non-Filipino."

"I always wanted to be an author. I thought it was the coolest job. As a child of immigrant parents, it wasn't ever something that they promoted. They always wanted me to do something practical."

"I considered myself white, having grown up essentially American but with Filipino parents. I don’t speak with an accent and I barely speak Tagalog. So, for most of my life, I looked at the world as a ‘white’ person."

"...There is a lack of diversity in publishing—authors and books—so if you want to write that book about growing up as a Filipino in the States, or a culture that you find interesting, do it now. Publishing is hard enough, and we need to take advantage of opportunities when we can."

"Like many American born Asian-Americans, I wanted to assimilate as a child. I wanted to fit in. As I grew older, I realized that instead of fitting in, why not stand out?"

"Now there was sophistry. A mage was a perilous beast, but a mage who was also a logician and a theologian was deadly enough to outface the devil himself."

"“You weren’t waiting up for me, were you?” Gerbert shrugged. “You know how little I sleep. I was contemplating my sins.” “Sleep will do you more good.”"

"In that instant, Gerbert hated him with a perfect hate. A monster, one could comprehend, and even forgive: one could see that a devil had possessed him. This flawless selfishness was beyond endurance."

"May God preserve us from an honest pope."

"“Peace.” Gerbert rolled the word on his tongue. “Is that what it is? I’d been calling it happiness.”"

"Traitors were not cherished even by those who bought them."

"There was no help for it. He was what he was, and that was an incorrigible meddler. Which, he reflected, was not an inadequate description of a mage."

"I am asking you to help me. Our mutual master would stride naked into the desert, trusting in God and in his own brilliance to shield him from the sun. But the desert knows only that it is. Neither gods nor cleverness mean anything to it."

"“So eager still! Do you never tire?” “Oh, yes, my Lord,” said Gerbert. “But when I’ve struggled long and hard, and then at last I understand, I forget everything but that.”"

"Gerbert recognized quality in the plainness of the woman’s robe, and in the carving of a lintel, and in the hanging of a rug on a whitewashed wall. The only magic in it was the alchemy of taste."

"“I would tell you that the West is sadly fallen. What men knew once, they know no longer, nor want to know. It is all iron and edged blades, and lord smiting lord for a fistful of power. They dream of empires, and they kill for a furlong of wasteland. “But I, my lord, I want to know what the world is.”"

"You are a fool, sir priest. Ignorance may excuse you. It will certainly kill you."

"Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we've had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen. With this in our mind, what shall be said of the man who arranges famine, who forces a labor strike with its privation, its rioting, its disorder, its bayonet thrusting, and its blood-letting as an incident in his money heaping? If necessity breeds crime, what is he who creates the necessity?"

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."

"UPON the woven leaf, Upon the veined flower, I find my life portrayed in bief– My life from hour to hour. A frail leaf fit to die; The faithful air of heaven by, While no wind roughly blew. All day for my delight, From dark to dark my own; One butterfly delaying flight, That left me not alone. A humming-bird to float Upon a breath; a bee To blow a long complaining note, Invited were of me."

"Hurst's books are characterized by purple prose and questionable grammar, but manage to fuse the basic elements of what we now call romance novels with a progressive attitude toward the hot button social issues of the day."

"…basically a fairly corny artist. We all know people who can write beautifully and can't tell a story worth a damn. She is really a wonderful storyteller."

"Miss Fannie Hurst joined us, having driven over from her retreat in the Catskill Mountains. Even the children fell under the spell of her personality and listened with great interest to all she had to tell us... . What wouldn’t I give to have her gift of writing, for if ever any one had material for stories spread before them, I certainly have had it in the past few years!"

"I am reading Fannie Hurst's book, "Great Laughter" and though I have only just begun, the character of Gregrannie, a dominating old woman, with many fine qualities, and her effect on those around her is tremendously interesting."

"Oh—oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?"

"Art transcends war. Art is the language of God and war is the barking of men. Beethoven is bigger than war."

"Luscious feet that listened to the soil and stole its secrets."

"Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles."

"If it means loathing war sufficiently to bear the unpleasant brunt of being branded a coward, I suppose I am a pacifist."

"It was any hotel suite now—uncompromising; leave me or take me."

"On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi."

"The heart has a resiliency. Strained to breaking, it can contract again. Even the waiting women, Iseult and Penelope, learned, as they sat sorrowing and watching, to sing to the swing of the sea."

"Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink."

"Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest? There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay, and Carrara façade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost."

"When the two sides of every story are told, Henry VIII may establish an alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her."

"Typical New-Yorker is the pseudo, half enviously bestowed upon his kind by hinter America."

"Dawn—then a blue, wintry sky, the color and hardness of enamel; and sunshine, bright, yet so far off the eye could stare up to it unsquinting."

"The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one. There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or what in the toga corresponded thereto."

"A woman still has to be twice as good as a man in order to get half as far."