Quotes from Ellen Datlow

I should know better than to try and measure the breadth and depth of love by its noise and dramas but there are times that I crave it, as if it's proof that love is alive.

Poor" is a word they never said, or "common." But the wife has worked so hard to make her vowels shallower and to lift her r's and to bring back her h's that she hardly speaks anymore; every time she opens her mouth, the farmhouse falls out all over again.

J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us that to leave fantasy in the nursery, or to believe that there is some particular connection between fairy tales and children, is to forget that children are not a separate race, a separate kind of creature from the human family at large.

Swimming up out of the depths was very much like waking that night on the Hansa—a sense of confusion resolving into the certainty of disaster: icebergs, torpedoes, exploded boilers, something beautiful shattered and devoured by the deep, a world consumed by a war that would not end.

I remember she had a silver light, real powerful but not really shining beyond her own skin. Almost too bright to look at. But I couldn't not look. None of us could bear to look at anything else. Sometimes it was Miss Drummond in the middle of the light, sometimes it was something else.

You remember the story I told you about the witch named Circe? She lived on an island alone, but men wandered there all the time, pretending to be blown off course. She turned every one of them into pigs, but they kept coming. Just to nibble at her painted toes a while before the slaughter. Well, turning men into pigs is no particular feat. The real exercise is getting pigs to write checks.

Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness.

Her skin was so tan that it reminded Krista of a stain. Coffee on blonde wood.

More like I dreamed it. More like I zoned out in the movie as a form of self-defense, and in that zoned-out state I worked up this grand story for how your father, he killed your mother, Sheel, really, serious, I solved the case. Also, there is a case. As proof, of course, I could take a can from the pantry, it doesn't matter what, and mess with its angle in the can opener until it leaves sharp little slivers of metal behind. At

The stringent scent of cleaner washes out past us.

Primitive peoples did not inspire Rudge, who saw in them the worst aspects of human nature, reminding him that superstition, ignorance, violence, and cruelty were inherent human traits, first impulses, and that civilization was a cheap coat of paint over a rotten edifice.

Her mouth was a red word of worship. I remember that. Red like she'd lipsticked it with blood. I stared at the petaling of her lips, the way she pursed them, incisors briefly lettering the plush flesh. Unlike the rest of them, she could sing: big operatic notes. A little rough along the higher registers, sure, but her voice when it plunged was smoky as the belly of an old whiskey cask.

It's one of those stories that needs tellin' because it's heavy," Tom said. "Tellin' it makes it easier to carry.

hosts, and girls who wore their sequins like someone else's forgotten shine.

Alan fell to his knees, his cognition crumbling beneath the weight of this like rotten wood. Something primordial in his brain shrieked and danced. His clasped his hands together under his chin, his lips seeking a prayer he'd never learned.

Henry knows it won't be a stray bullet for him, like the one that took his father. It'll be a broken heart. The drug overdoses, the traffic accidents, the little boy running into the street after his ball, the old man freezing to death in an alleyway with nowhere else to go. They will erode Paul, like water wearing down stone, until there's nothing left.

a hatred I was going to feel anyway for men whose evil came not from some grand design, but cost-benefit analysis and spite.

Moral: If at first you don't succeed, invent fire. Or hire a chef. Preferably one with imagination. Jane Yolen

Time is a ring, and in the House of Belphegor that ring contracts like a muscle.

But she has an insecure core that desperately needs to be more than a pretty face. She is accustomed to being the center of attention, and when the spotlight slides my way, she deflates, her anxieties twisting into anger that homes in on me, as if I've stolen that spotlight from her.

Cicadas are intimately acquainted with pain, because they know what it is to die a slow death as a spectacle for someone else's pleasure. But they do not die when they are buried. They merely dream, and listen to other buried things, things that perhaps should not have been buried at all. They remember what they hear. When they wake, they are ready to tell the secrets they know. When they wake, they sing.

I mean, pain really should count for something, don't you think? Considering how much it hurts.

The sound has hooks beneath his skin, wanting to drag him in among the trees.

The hours after her discovery blur in his mind, though certain moments stand out sharp as splinters beneath his skin.