Anthologies Quotes

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights) ~ Jonathan Santlofer

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights) ~ Bill Bernico

I worked all day in back ofa hot van snipping off dog balls, I can cut one more pair. (Dark City Lights) ~ Thomas Pluck

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights) ~ David Levien

Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

If I'd learned nothing else in my twenty-seven years on this planet, I'd learned that when someone gives you something totally unexpected and undeserved, you don't ask questions. ~ Jill D. Block

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it. ~ Judith Guest

Oh, I love to read more than anything. I always love the 'New Stories From the South' anthologies - I think it's the best short fiction collection anywhere, just filled with treasures. ~ Lucy Alibar

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies. ~ Eugenio Montale

A New York plate that said you die. (Dark City Lights) ~ Ed Park

I'll read any anthologies or collection I can get my hands on. If I find a book mentioned in 'Publisher's Weekly,' and it looks like it will be dark, I'll track it down. ~ Ellen Datlow

I think there are just a million interviews in anthologies with famous musicians that are about the music, and they're really boring to read. ~ Neil Strauss

I'm looking for something new to believe in that isn't the way people yearn at night in the city. ~ Constance Renfrow

I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we? ~ Aaron Spelling

I myself discovered many authors through school reading lists and through school anthologies. The positives are: young readers can find the world opening up to them through books they study. The negatives may include bad experiences kids have - if they don't like the book or the teacher, or the way the book is taught. ~ Margaret Atwood

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates. ~ H.L. Mencken

She shuffled with her head bowed, her dark eyes drifting to avoid contact, and she screamed in bed at night. (Dark City Lights) ~ Jim Fusilli

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. ~ Pat Conroy

See, the 17 year old girl in me fell in love with your silent eyes. I imagine they looked the same when you were convinced of your own brokenness. I imagine your lashes wrote anthologies every time they kissed your cheeks; maybe that's why I heard a century of voices in your quiet. Every unspoken part of you sang symphonies when we touched and I found myself wanting to be a musician all over again. ~ Aman Batra

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her. ~ Mary Papas

Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet. ~ Lynn Abbey

Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights) ~ Peter Carlaftes

I was always the last to leave. That was my great skill. ~ Tara Isabella Burton, "Here In Avalon" Songs Of My Selfie

Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights) ~ Jane Dentinger

A Lancashire Weaver

This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
The machines now stand idle
Looms clatter no more
There's a stack of old bobbins
piled up by the door.
I remember my Mam
she worked here, so she said
A Lancashire weaver
but now she is dead
Along with this mill
and along with the dreams
of working mill lasses
and their jobs, so it seems
We once wove the best
cotton cloth in the world
But now that's all gone
on the scrap heap been hurled
The clatter of clogs
on the old cobbled street
the humdrum staccato
from thousands of feet.
Tough work and much hardship
and many a care
Folks they got by
for brass, it was rare
but still we had pride
By Christ, did we ever!
Will it ever come back
The answer is NEVER
This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
I'm glad that my Mam
never saw it this way
Out in all weathers
came here every day
When this closed down
she had already died
Perhaps just as well
She'd have bloody well cried. ~ David Hayes

The dimple in his left cheek was ironic-it gave the impression that he was sweet as a cupcake. (Dark City Lights) ~ Elaine Kagan

We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies. ~ Annalee Newitz

She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights) ~ Annette Meyers

Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain. ~ James Wolcott

The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights) ~ Robert Silverberg

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights) ~ Eve Kagan

The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be. ~ John D'Agata

You were just a young girl not wanting to let on that death could happen to one who hadn't even lived yet. ~ Katherine Sloan, "Because You Were Under 30" Songs Of My Selfie

Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness. ~ Salil Jha

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain. ~ Rebecca West

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies. ~ Carl Clinton Van Doren

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books. ~ Molly Antopol

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,
I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole! ~ Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes I help him out and sometimes he helps me out, and sometimes he tries to push me through the wall. (Dark City Lights) ~ Parnell Hall

It was as if my sould had left my body, floated up to the ceiling, and was watching me destroy my own career with one deliberately assaultive punch. (Dark City Lights) ~ Peter Hochstein

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did. ~ Ray Bradbury

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature. ~ Lawrence Block

Making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors. ~ Margaret Atwood

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor. ~ Elizabeth Janeway

Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it. ~ Joshua Isard

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies. ~ Karen Russell

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it. ~ Edward Hirsch

Browsing the first editions at my local independent bookstore, I came across 'Pastoralia,' a collection of stories by George Saunders. I'd read one of the stories in it already, and several other Saunders stories in magazines and anthologies, and liked them all. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart