Editors From The United States

"Often, in writing, granting the basic skill of writing a literate English sentence—which can no longer be taken for granted even in college graduates—all it takes is determination."

"A story with no moral isn't worth writing; a story with no plot isn't worth reading. And if people get your point before they get your story, you are to hire a soapbox instead."

"The horror genre—which I define as “perfectly horrible things happen to perfectly nice people for no reason at all.”"

"There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat."

"Ric Flair was still the biggest draw in either company (in 1998)."

"They (fans) respond mostly to what WWE trains them to respond to. An ankle lock gets over because Kurt Angle does the ankle lock and everyone submits to it. A triangle by Undertaker doesn't get over because WWE has never trained the fans to accept that as a finish because no one ever taps to it. And it was the same thing when Shamrock was in WWE."

"I can remember depending on people like Eric Frank Russell and J. T. Macintosh to give me a good, comfortable read, to tell me a story. Whether they told me anything I didn't know or hadn't thought about or read someplace else was another matter. Later I read all of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books."

"Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children."

"Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work."

"America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy."

"If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?"

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

"Margaret Anderson, when she explained the raison d'être for her new magazine, expressed a typical viewpoint: "The Little Review is a magazine that believes in life for Art's sake, in the Individual rather than incomplete people, ... a magazine written for Intelligent people who can feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendor..., and whose function is to express itself.""

"The quality in the anarchists that Anderson found most appealing was their explosive individualism, a trait she shared. Deliberately, provokingly, and often charmingly outrageous, Anderson never concerned herself with public opinion. Her unconventionality in this regard endeared her to Emma Goldman, who had begun to enjoy the attention and homage of the young middle-class rebels who formed the core of the new bohemia. Anderson's anarchism in fact stemmed directly from her friendship with Goldman. Anderson remained an anarchist for three years. Her drift away from the movement was actuated by her realization that Goldman and Alexander Berkman were human beings with frailties as well as strengths, not superbeings whom she could worship uncritically … Anderson never entered the mainstream of the movement. Despite her later assertion that during her years as an anarchist she found "people in clean collars uninteresting" and that she "even accepted smells, personal as well as official," since "everyone who came to the studio smelled of machine oil or herring." Anderson actually spent most of her time with the movement's leaders." An elitist, she was simply drawn to people who emanated powerful individual strength or who seemed to her unique. Further, anarchism for her had all the romanticism of a lost cause. Involved with the movement between 1914 and 1917, during its decline, Anderson believed herself a member of an elite community, not a participant in a rebellion of the masses. In one sense, Margaret Anderson can be viewed as the personification of the alienated artist or intellectual attracted to radical causes as a by-product of her aesthetic rebellion. While others who had a greater sense of social purpose turned to socialism, her wildly emotional individualism led her directly to the anarchists. As long as the anarchists as individuals retained their fascination for her, she immersed herself in their cause; when they exhibited human weakness, she became disillusioned. Needing to worship, she was not content merely to participate."

"Intellectuals are too sentimental for me."

"How can anyone be interested in war? — that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over the mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well-chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it — this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable? If you're involved in it, you die; if you read about it, you can't sleep."

"Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim — for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths — when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate."

"It has been years since I have seen anyone who could even look as if he were in love. No one's face lights up any more except for political conversation."

"People with heavy physical vibrations rule the world."

"I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines... I change everyone's coiffure — except those that please me — and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made."

"I discovered that the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet."

"Until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems."

"I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do."

"Although Le Guin tended to discount the distinction between dream-world and "real" world, she made a sharp distinction between the real world and the world of science fiction. When asked if there is really a difference between what we call reality and science fiction, she retorted decisively: "You bet you there is. You keep that firmly in mind. It's a fiction. You know what Marianne Moore said about imaginary gardens with real toads-sometimes there are real gardens with imaginary toads in them. But it's a mixture. Fiction writers write fiction, particularly in science fiction. People forget this and say they are describing reality or they are predicting reality. But the very most that a fiction writer can do is offer an option.""

"Marianne Moore is fundamental, and not only for having published poets of great intensity, such as Hart Crane, in the Dial, her splendid poetry review. It is difficult to define her contribution, so decisive it appears to me, but I am certain that she is our most original poetess, the one who has brought a brilliant precision to poetic language by means of a meticulous conservatism. Her extremely personalized style is at this moment influencing the young poets of the United States. She has succeeded in introducing a great variety of poetic motives, maintaining the ancestral, 'out-of-date' virtues of American culture-such as irony, a subtle sense of humor, understatement-while keeping herself at the same time within the creative vanguard of poetry in the English language."

"We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained."

"Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, "Farewell, good sense.""

"The problems is mastered — insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut."

"Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal — the symbol of medicine."

"A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague."

"Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister."

"What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save."

"We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave."

"Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco brimming with inner light — that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero."

"So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ..."

"This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador — the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity."

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits.""

"that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder."

"'Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form"

"If you demand on the other hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry."

"Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine."

"Consume hostility; employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity! Insurgent feet shall not outrun multiplied flames, O Sun."

"You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

"O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"