Editors From The United States

"We had more church after supper, with a long sermon from Reverend Beelson. He talked about wars and earthquakes and floods as signs that the End was coming. Which made me wonder if he had somehow managed to not notice that wars, earthquakes, and floods have been going on since the beginning of history. But I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t worth the effort."

"Wars may make heroes of men, but not all the time."

"“We are all sleeping princesses some time. But it is better to be fully awake, don’t you think?”...“Americans do not want to be awake?” “Oh,” Becca said, “we like the truth all right. When it’s tidy.” “Truth is never tidy. Only fairy tales.”"

"Wars do not make heroes of everyone."

"“Dad, everyone knows Beelson is a nutcase! You should hear the things they say about him in school.” My father looked at me sadly. “I thought you didn’t believe in basing your life on what everyone else says, Mr. Nonconformist.” “OK, skip what everyone else says. I think he’s nuts.”"

"She hated to lie but she hated arguments even more."

"But when I asked Mom, she shrugged and looked up at the sky. She had given up looking at me when we talked. “Reverend Beelson told us God would provide,” she said, as if reading that in the clouds. “And he does not lie.” It wasn’t clear if she meant Reverend Beelson or God."

"I think that a speculative literature from a culture that has been on the receiving end of the colonization glorified in some SF could be a compelling body of writing. Look at the work of the Jewish speculative fiction writers, like Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose, which uses the elements of the folktale as a lens into the horrors of the Holocaust, and never once allows readers to romanticize the experience. It's brilliant."

"It is not crazy to want to know the past. It is only crazy to live there, like so many of the aristocracy."

"Overhead the swallows dipped down to catch bugs rising from the ground. Then they soared back up beyond the barracks. Hannah watched them for a moment, scarcely breathing. It was as if all nature ignored what went on in the camp. There were brilliant sunsets and soft breezes. Around the commandant’s house, bright flowers were teased by the wind. Once she’d seen a fox cross the meadow to disappear into the forest."

"She filled the pot, got out a new filter, threw the old one onto the garbage, and counted out five tablespoons of Columbian Supreme. Then she waited while the magic of modern invention turned tap water into a hot dark-brown caffeine-powered drink. It was better than any Biblical miracle and risked no beliefs."

"Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself."

"“I’ll drive. You navigate.” He grinned. “I judge people by how well they read maps.”"

"Princesses did not make scenes. One needed to be a queen to do that."

"“No, you cannot…must not…shall not…may not…” to everything that seemed even the slightest bit interesting or exciting or dangerous. So Waverly did what every child of ten does. He did it all anyway."

"Time may heal wounds, but it does not erase the scars."

"Looking backward was an old man’s drug."

"Fifteen years can be a long or a short time, depending upon whether one is immortal or not."

"Madness also makes folks uneasy; they fear contagion."

"For what was art, she thought, but the heart and soul made visible."

"There is no liar like the one who lies to himself. He has a fool indeed for an audience."

"“Will you write the story?” “If there is one.” “Happy ending or no?” He was serious. She attempted a smile. “Fairy tales always have a happy ending.” He leaned back in his chair. “That depends.” “On what?” “On whether you are Rumplestiltskin or the Queen.”"

"A deep, deep sadness. You know there's a theologian named Michael Novack who's quoted as saying that 'a community is better off losing its opera house, or its museum, or its CHURCH' — here's a theologian speaking — 'than its ball team'. Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers were taken away."

"Nobody hearing my words right now is thinking, Oh man, remember that show, back when it used to be good?"

"Progress' constant companion is nostalgia for the way things used to be."

"I'm just a very mindful, worried person in a lot of ways. And I remember the first time I took ecstasy, all that goes away. And I remember having the thought, "Do other people live this way? Is this what it's like for other people? Are there people who have this experience of feeling no anxiety, and just walking up to people and assuming that people might like them?"

"Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

"Why is my job like the second job that somebody who's a genius at something else can do, and actually still be really good at? It's not fair!"

"The honest answer to your question is that I think Anaheed and I could do this whole thing better, and that we're a terrible role model for anyone. We muddle our way through, for sure. And we've been together for 20 years—but it's hard on us. I feel like I know other people who manage it way, way better."

"What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

"The thing that happens to me is that if it’s going well, and the person is really talking from the heart about a thing that means something to them. And I’m talking back to them, and we’re understanding each other, and like I start to feel really close to them. I know that as like a professional journalist, it’s not like the right thing to say, to say this, but I start to really love them. Like it has the intimacy of any like actual intimate conversation with somebody who I feel super close to."

"The Cruise is one of my favorite films and very close to the spirit of This American Life: It’s funny and moving and surprising and just beautiful to look at–black and white, shot on the cheap with all natural light on digital video, incredibly."

"There are stories that change the way I see stuff, like the Harper High School story. I didn't really understand what it was like to live in a neighborhood like that, or be a kid like that. One of the things we learned is that every kid in the school is in a gang. The nerd kids are in a gang. The drama kids are in a gang. Before I read that series, and this is kind of ugly to say, but I would think, ‘Well, if they got shot they're a gang kid ... that's a bad kid.’ I don't feel that any more at all. Those of us who don't live in neighborhoods like that, we're so dumb."

"Music is like basil. Put it on. Don't think twice."

"I don't tweet because I don't need another creative venue. I don't need another form for self-expression. I don't need another way to get my thoughts out to people. I have one."

"'I don’t know, it seems weird to be making this much money and asking people to donate money,' It seemed unseemly. So I said, 'I think that I should just make less.’ I just thought it ... seemed fair. It seemed like I should make what you make if you're like, a high school principal or something. Not even the principal, but the assistant principal."

"Before Google Docs existed, those rare times I met software engineers, I’d ask them to please create software so two people in different locations could edit a document together online. God bless Google Docs."

"I called Ira up and I said, 'You're gonna be a cult hero eventually'—and I think it's coming true. The other thing I said to him was, 'It's gonna devour you.'"

"Ira is a big fag. He's just not a homosexual."

"As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it."

"Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question."

"The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs."

"Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves."

"After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large."

"We feel like more than just the sum of a trillion neurons. We feel like more than just three pounds of wet flesh, and so simply describing the brain in terms of its neurotransmitters and neurons and all these chemicals and exciting ingredients doesn't fully grapple with what it feels like to be human, the first person subjective experience of being a conscious being. When you think about the really grand epic questions of neuroscience … what is consciousness? How can we form a scientific explanation for consciousness, for human experience? That is the holy grail."

"Harrison was an extremely popular figure in the SF world, renowned for being amiable, outspoken and endlessly amusing. His quickfire, machine-gun delivery of words was a delight to hear, and a reward to unravel: he was funny and self-aware, he enjoyed reporting the follies of others, he distrusted generals, prime ministers and tax officials with sardonic and cruel wit, and above all he made plain his acute intelligence and astonishing range of moral, ethical and literary sensibilities."

"The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness."

"I sat down with a filled glass in front of a glass-eyed instrument called a TV. As I had guessed, my accent in the local language left a lot to be desired, and I wanted to listen to someone who spoke a better form of it. This was not easy to find. To begin with, it was hard to tell which were the educational channels and which were there for entertainment. I found what appeared to be a morality play in historical form where all the men wore wide-brimmed hats and rode on horses. But the total vocabulary used could not have been more than 100 words, and most of the characters were killed by shooting before I could discover what it was all about. Guns seemed to play an important role in most of the dramas I watched, though this was varied with sadism and assorted kinds of mayhem. All this violence and hurtling from one place to another in various conveyances did not leave the people much time for intersexual activity; a brief kiss was the only manifestation of affection or libido that I saw. Most of the dramas were also difficult to follow since they kept being interrupted by brief playlets and illustrated lectures about the purchase of various consumer goods."

"Like all women, she was a true pragmatist."

"We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment."