Quotes & Sayings About Anthologies

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored. — Anais Nin

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

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

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

The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights) — Tom Callahan

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

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

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. — Gary Saul Morson

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

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

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

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

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

The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights) — Warren Moore

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights) — S.J. Rozan

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

I believe in anthologies, although I know they offer only a glimpse. — Leonora Speyer

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

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

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 immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years. — Edmund Gosse

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

Bedtime stories
Eventide Rhapsodies
Anthologies of Memory
Please enter cautiously and feel free to open what is closed — Erin Morgenstern

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

This isn't where I intended to be. Killing a person has a funny way of getting your life off-track. — Erin Mitchell

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

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

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

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides. — William Ernest Henley

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

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

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

I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights) — Jerrold Mundis

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

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

Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely. — Brian Koppelman

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

When I first started editing a 'Year's Best' volume in the '70s, the job was pretty straightforward - there were three or four monthly magazines to read and a few original anthologies from trade publishers every year. — Gardner Dozois

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives. — Gary Saul Morson

History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights) — Kat Georges

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

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts - eighteenth-century Reader's Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for "delicious morsels," one that spits out "every thing which is plain." Good books, in contrast, require good readers: "In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them. — Karen Swallow Prior

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

And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex ... — Sara Levine

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'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

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

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

I'll have to self-publish it because unless you're on the 'New York Times' bestseller lists, anthologies don't sell all that well. However, low sales to a big publisher are a major success to a small one! — P.N. Elrod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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