Quotes from Ellen Datlow

Nothing ruined working with animals like the need to work with people at the same time.

The wood smoke gave the whole place the scent of autumn

Kelly Link is the author of three collections: Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have appeared in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales; Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things; Firebirds Rising; The Starry Rift; The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales; and The Restless Dead.

I also love 'Mr. Fox' and the advice that his bride-to-be sees carved above the door to his house: BE BOLD, BE BOLD. She goes inside, of course, and then she sees more advice: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. But she goes through that door, too. The next piece of advice is BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT YOUR HEART'S BLOOD RUN COLD. I bet you can imagine what she does anyway.

The woman looked at the man, who was nursing his thumb. "I know you're still pissed about Siberia.

A man with no memory is interesting, while a man with sad memories can't be buried fast enough.

A bumblebee buzzed past, off on unknowable insect errands. Its body was fat, furry, striped in a way she could only envy. It did not sing. It did not speak. It did not stop to dance for her, or to challenge her to a game of riddles. Fear twisted in her gut, unfamiliar as a needle in a butterscotch pudding. The rules of this world, whatever they were, seemed to be consistent and cruel: they were not nonsense, no, not nonsense at all.

The root J-N-N has so many derivatives. Jannah, paradise, is the hidden garden. Majnoon is a crazy person whose intellect has been hidden. My favorite, though, is janin. The embryo hidden inside the mother. The jinn are not gone from our world, you see. They've just donned new clothes.

She thought about his odd appearance, but could find no revulsion in her heart—perhaps only someone who was very ugly or very beautiful could understand how little beauty mattered.

children often didn't notice the things adults classified as disastrous. The opposite, Whitcomb thought, was also true.

Cathy recognized the voice before her last name was spoken. She turned to see her ex-boyfriend Kevin standing behind her in the bookstore. Her stomach sank a little. But, one of the by-products of meeting a man later in life was that he would end up meeting some ex-boyfriends along the way. She didn't think Ben would mind. It was a part of life. Part of being forty.

So the little girl collected feeling like a cistern collects the rain, and when she held too much, she pulled it out and sealed it in beautiful vessels.

Jim Bradley shook his head. Cathy didn't want to admit it, but he had the unmistakable look of someone who was in the right.

I got a better idea," he said. He smiled then. A warm, genuine smile that had Cathy believing he was feeling good again. That she had done the very thing all partners want so desperately to do: she had stopped him from feeling bad.

Cathy looked to the staircase before following Ben to the living room. It didn't sound like anybody else was home. Didn't he say he lived with his parents? Didn't he say they were a little older? Needed his help around the house? It smelled like Ben needed a little help around the house.

Counting the minute-long seconds and the hour-long minutes.

This gentleman had been born with angry bones.

Nothing in her inflection had changed; her expression was neutral, not hostile. And yet Alan felt as though the balance had shifted, and his footing was unsteady. He tried to get it back. "Were

People say that life is a party! You arrive after it's started, and you leave before it ends.

Love that can't trump intellectual integrity isn't worth the name.

I'm too exhausted to sleep

I hated and loved him in turns, as witches will do, for our hearts are strange and inexplicable.

Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was to find in her always the best—of herself, himself, and all the world.

The beer got him, and, for a moment, a rush of idiot compassion urged him to hug a pinch-faced man in brown overalls who sat on a stool surrounded by primitive paintings of Jesus engaged in various farm chores (milking a cow, driving a tractor, killing a hog), but the desire to comfort the untalented, the misguided, left Wally before he could act.