The Commonplace Book of Quotations-- Current Obsessions and Preoccupations

From a blog called The Evil Editor:
“You seem to have confused "requesting manuscripts" with "reading manuscripts." An average timeline, measuring time in sentences (or ETU's, which, for those of you outside the editorial loop, stands for Editorial Time Units), for reading a requested manuscript is as follows:
3 ETU's: Start thinking, What planet was I on, and what was I smoking, when I requested this?
5 ETU's: Toss MS onto recycling mountain in corner, pour self a stiff one, and pop in DVD of Misery to watch an author being tortured.”

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(forwarded by Naseem)

“What has been lost in the debate about immigration is this fact: our country’s foreign and economic policy is largely to blame for the flow of people who come here illegally…If you think about the hundreds of thousands of people who have come here over the past several decades from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, many of them fled to the U.S. because they would have been killed or imprisoned by their government’s repressive regimes or forced to live as refugees. These were often regimes that our government supported for many years, if not decades, with large infusions of weapons and money.”
-- Jonathan Tasini (Hillary Clinton’s opponent for the NY Democratic senatorial nomination)

[OEE note: Let the Republicans show their pious respect for the law by making it a felony to HIRE illegal immigrants.]

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“The Post has a graphic depicting that this war in Iraq, in dollar terms, has surpassed the U.S. Civil War, the first Gulf War, and World War I in cost. We are going to surpass the Korean War in 9 months. And we are spending at a rate far greater than we were in Vietnam, and will surpass Vietnam in about 24 months.“
-– Steve Clemons, The Washington Note

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“If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12.00 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want.” --Tommy Johnson, brother of Rev. Ladell Johnson (no relation to Robert)

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Nobel Peace Prize-winner and Iranian human rights advocate and
dissident Shirin Ebadi was asked on PBS last week about the $75 million the US State Department intends to spend supporting pro-democracy groups in her country, to which she answered, "Can democracy be brought to people by bombs? Democracy is a culture. It has to come from within a society, not brought by America to a society."

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Qwest, fourth-largest phone company in the US, refused to turn the company's calling records over to the government because of "a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," according to their lawyer.

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Hear the sound of the falling rain
Coming down like an Armageddon flame (Hey!)
The shame
The ones who died without a name

Hear the dogs howling out of key
To a hymn called "Faith and Misery" (Hey!)
And bleed, the company lost the war today

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives
On holiday

Hear the drum pounding out of time
Another protestor has crossed the line (Hey!)
To find, the money's on the other side

Can I get another Amen? (Amen!)
There's a flag wrapped around a score of men (Hey!)
A gag, a plastic bag on a monument...

--“Holiday” by Green Day (on "American Idiot")
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"As with all the monsters of legend, the death and destruction of the werewolf requires some special effort. And once the lycanthrope, like the vampire and even the animated mummy, acquired a subconscious and a sense of tragedy, it gained a tragic flaw. Putting aside silver bullets (merely an instrument) we find that the secret ingredient is... love.....Whenever the end comes...it must involve someone who was emotionally involved with the werewolf's human persona... Very often it is this person who strikes the deathblow, and then watches, with deep sorrow or deep shock as appropriate, as the fangs retract and the hair does whatever it is the hair does..."
-- John M. Ford, in his collection “Heat of Fusion”

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"See---one kind of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other side, the other profile, is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but the lusts and dark passions. It all depends on which side faces the moon at the ebb of the tide."
--Lionel Atwill, 1944 (quote provided by Wayne Sallee)

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Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall burn this world, had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire,
That this her fever might be it ?
-- John Donne, “A Fever”

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“A few years ago, I drove nearly seven hours to read two stories at a
Monday night session hosted by the Twilight Tales Reading Group in Chicago. And every penny I spent to get there and back was well worth it. The Twilight Tales gang are some of the nicest people you can meet, and they are amazingly supportive of writers. Not just horror writers either. Just plain W R I T E R S.” -- Judy Rohrig

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“After being asked ... to speak at an event held at the International Reading Association's conference in Chicago earlier this month, [Patricia] Polacco said she accepted the invitation through her staff.
A number of exchanges between Buchanan and Polacco's people followed, largely regarding what the author would discuss at the event, until Polacco was ultimately told she could not speak against No Child Left Behind in her speech.
.... Because SRA/McGraw-Hill publishes a number of the tests used in NCLB, the house was not eager to have Polacco speak her mind on the Bush-established initiative. And, after Polacco refused to alter her speech, she was dropped from the program.” – Publishers’ Weekly

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See Also:
"We're literally going to drown in our own uneducated"
Why am I being played by a 16-year-old lipgloss model?,
"He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter",
"I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers"