Quotes from Ellen Datlow

There's an observation attributed to Aristotle, which goes to show how long the complainers have been a bother: If you don't want to be criticized, then do nothing, say nothing, be nothing, make nothing.

He's quiet long enough that I'm about to prod, when he speaks in that way of his that I'm sure he thinks is gentle but is patronizing as hell. Is that what Trinity hears when I address her concerns? Shit. I'll need to be more careful. There's a fine line between "gentle" and "patronizing," and I might be straying as far over it as Oscar is.

Henry knows all movies are ghost stories, frozen slices of time, endlessly replayed. Whatever will happen has already happened. The only thing he and Paul can do is witness it.

That's one of the things that lies in the deeps, never far enough from the surface; the only real difference between the broken ones and everyone else is that the broken ones know there isn't one.

There are angels in Hell," the horror writer told him, "not just in Heaven. Indeed, the angels of Hell may be the more numerous.

Out the plane's window, flatlands had given way to the rough and rumpled chaos of mountain peaks and alpine valleys.

Call me before you go looking. I mean it. I'm coming with you." He almost said, whether you like it or not, but Henry knows it isn't a matter of like; it's a matter of need. He saw the gratitude in Paul's eyes and his self-loathing underneath it, hating the fact that he should need to ask Henry to do this thing, that he should be too cowardly to refuse and demand Henry stay home. One way or another, they will both see this through to the end.

The pain has lessened with age, but never goes away. Now the doctors give it a name—endometriosis. Their tone when talking to me is always one of judgmental solemnity, as if this sickness is a curse given to me because I never found a husband, instead of a curse that prevented me from getting one. Or maybe I have always just imagined this in their voices.

If the Chicago we'd left behind was all lake-frozen winds, Vancouver was wet springtime chill, with swirls of rain drizzling from banks of black clouds that scraped over the coast with the ponderous density of tectonic plates.

The map led us over civilization's ragged rim, to the edge of the Northwest's boreal forests. Evening came on all at once, the sky's last light choked out by old growth pines and cypress lining the roads like shaggy towers. Our

what the magazines called blended families, because that made step-parents and step-brothers and step-sisters sound sweet, like a smoothie rather than something out of the Brothers Grimm.

Maybe he was annoyed by the criticism he got for the scene in Grizzly Man during which he listens to Timothy Treadwell's death over headphones: Why should he get to hear it and we don't? There was no need—the coroner had already given a play-by-play account. The voyeurs still wanted more. They wanted to hear raw mortality.

But abuse isn't like an uncomfortable pair of boots you can just kick off. It's like being the passenger in a car speeding the wrong way down the highway. You know there's hurt ahead, but you're too scared to jump out. All you can do is hope it slows down, or better still, that it stops completely. Maybe it's different for other victims, who have more family and friends, or who live in a bigger town.

With his back turned on the life-giving sea, he eventually sets off waddling toward the mountains of the interior. There's more disturbing footage from polar regions, but it's the implications that needle at me. The penguin's journey is certain death. Were they to catch him and bring him back, the biologist explains, he would only head for the mountains again. It sounds like the voice of experience, as if they've tried and failed. The penguins refuse to be saved.

It's a lie, it's a lie, I'm screaming inside. I think of paralyzing venoms and morphine dreams. You're only seeing what will keep you docile… But try telling him that. As Stefan sags further, a gap opens between them, and in the hostile interplay of firelight and shadow, I catch a glimpse of the network of gnashing maws at the chaotic center of Jaeger's being.

Before Lydia and I could make it to the car, that keening I'd hoped to never hear again began to shred the night air, rising in pitch beyond the range of human ears.

fairy tales are about ordinary men and women in extraordinary circumstances.

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.

I'm lucky to have a leg at all," Heldt had once told him. "The fucking surgeon was a butcher. He should have cut the fucking thing off and handed me a crutch." The cinema was his crutch.

course, but a purely personal one that would cleave not the ship, but their little trio, along fault lines none of them had before acknowledged.

Unlike Heldt, he'd been spared the endless horror that followed: the gas, the artillery, the grenades, and, most of all, the vast wasteland of barbed wire and landmines between the rat-infested trenches, where Lewis guns spat out death at five hundred rounds a minute, and flyblown corpses bloomed like roses.

The Cinderella Game Kelly Link

Here's the deal. Words have plans. Ambitions. Goals. They are always trying to veer around us & zoom away. They wish to leave us in an abysmal darkness. You can think what you like about this.

His new stepsister, Darcy, stood in the door that went down to the second floor. Her hair was black and knotted and stringy, and, no surprise, she was wearing one of her dozens of princess dresses. This one had been pink and spangled at one point. Now it looked like something a zombie would wear to a fancy dress party.