Quotes from Ellen Datlow

everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.

Deduction was for the highbrows in top hats and great coats; I performed my detecting with a boot and a six-gun.

the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.

Only fools and the dead never change their mind.

This story is about the eschatology of shadow puppets.

Before. Yes, before, I sailed my little boat on a placid sea of ignorance. Was I blissful? Oh my, yes. Before the truth floated like jetsam towards me, fouling my rudder . . .

On a bleak day in April, just before the first crocuses broke through the sodden gray of autumn leaves, Ann, that was her name, Krey's love, got Stage 1 of Dying Stupidly. A scratch from a squirrel she was feeding got infected. Some days later, they gave her penicillin. Then they put her in the hospital where she got streptococcal pneumonia. From scratch to burial took a month.

we stand revealed as something our parents are mortified to have created.

I clung to the misty margin and watched the grasslands through much of the day, noting the way the light shifted and phantom sprites sometimes moved through the air above the rippling strands, auroral presences like the vaporous dreams of things hidden below the soil.

Every day someone out there comes to the end of his tether, decides he can't carry on any more, and starts looking for a really good method to end it all. How do you do it? Let me count the ways.

so mean that her death would cause a thousand of Hell's toughest demons to opt for early retirement.

He had worked to save those men, though it had been hopeless work. Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors had become shepherds to the process.

I was taught that the villagers and the slum dwellers were like animals," she said. "It was the responsibility of people of the educated classes to see to it rules were followed and order maintained. Animals can't think for themselves. Animals have no feelings.

Sometimes God needs a sacrifice. Sometimes the road is complicit. No life is sacrosanct.

You know how in our brains, behind all the recent flashy developments that gave us stuff like emotions and aesthetics and cosmic awareness, there's this lizard brain. It's what makes the heart beat and what stays alert to odd noises and sudden movements in the dark while we sleep. Don't wonder where the dinosaurs went, there's a bit of one inside each of us.

When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a screaming buffet on the run. Yet there will be only silence and vacant rooms where once there was food, and the zombies, in their slow and stumbling way, will be surprised.

were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm." His

I realized very young that I loved reading and wanted to do something related to books/reading for a living. I didn't think of publishing, really, until I was out of college.

I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.

Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and - too often - for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can 'grow' longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child's play and the focus of adult art and adult fear.

Horror is edgier. Dark fantasy feels mushier to me. Finding the difference - it's an instinct. And they overlap a lot.

Horror isn't only about ghosts or monsters. For example, paranormal romance seems the antithesis of horror. Once you have a sexy, fun vampire who is sweet, and you have a happy ending, it's not horror.

Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey have been successful in their self-publishing ventures. But notice that Hocking would prefer to write and hand over the editing, promotion, and selling to a traditional publisher.