Ellen Datlow > Quotes

“It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves.”
― Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Teeth: Vampire Tales

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

“Love that can’t trump intellectual integrity isn’t worth the name.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“I’m too exhausted to sleep,”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“It's my latest," Goldy concluded, "my best, and the one which the New York Times recently described as 'thrilling, sad, heartbreaking' and 'packs a huge wallop.' Entitled The Goldilocks Syndrome, it's currently available in the lobby at a today-only discount of $21.95. And if you act now, I'll sign and date this sucker at no extra charge.”
― Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Black Heart, Ivory Bones

“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.”
― Ellen Datlow, Black Heart, Ivory Bones

“everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Monstrous

“I hated and loved him in turns, as witches will do, for our hearts are strange and inexplicable.”
― Ellen Datlow, Troll's-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales

“If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man but deteriorate the cat—" Now”
― Ellen Datlow, Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“Deduction was for the highbrows in top hats and great coats; I performed my detecting with a boot and a six-gun.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft's Monsters

“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.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.”
― Ellen Datlow, Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2014 Edition

“We started as accidents,” he continues, behind her. “Leftovers. Microbes in a digital sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions, or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange. No one cared what it meant when they became something new—or at least, not at first. We became them. They became us. Then we, together, began to grow.”
― Ellen Datlow, After

“I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“Rudge was not a pessimist, but he’d lived long enough to know that hope had to be kept on a short leash.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft's Monsters

“It was a nice voice, smooth and deep as double chocolate ice cream.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm

“were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe”
― Ellen Datlow, Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2014 Edition

“WHEN WALLY BENNETT was a kid, his parents taught him to say this prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. He had stopped saying the prayer at nine or ten, and he had always found it disturbing, for two reasons. One: Dying in his sleep was not a pleasant thought, not something Wally wished to entertain; the idea that the Lord was poised above his sleeping form like some immense holy vulture waiting to grab his soul—and do exactly what with it?—was unsettling, to say the least. And two: There was always the implicit suggestion that, should he forget to say this prayer, something awful would occur. One of Satan’s minions might drag him into the abyss.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“I mean, pain really should count for something, don’t you think? Considering how much it hurts.”
― Ellen Datlow, When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson

“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.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Two

“She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.”
― Ellen Datlow, After

“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.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“It’s easier to acquiesce. Everyone does, they tell him.”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“—Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you’ll last longer.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Three

“I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art,” she’d responded. “Open the valve and the energy escapes.”
― Ellen Datlow, Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2014 Edition

“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 . . .”
― Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound

“Times have changed. People live longer, but that hasn't translated into longer childhoods.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Doll Collection

“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.”
― Ellen Datlow, After

“Any idea what started it?” “No obvious point of origin, but Perry Horne will be out later and he can tell us more.” Joe unzipped his jacket a little way and palmed sweat from his throat. “I don’t need a fire marshal to tell you it wasn’t an accident, though.” Peck sighed and stiffened his jaw. The fire chief nodded, started toward the ruin. Peck followed. They skirted the yard where dry grass ticked, then crossed to the house’s eastern face, intact but damaged. The ground was soupy from the hoses’ spray. Peck stepped around the deeper puddles where the sky was reflected dull. A child’s soft toy stared at him with stitches for eyes. “You might want to ready yourself,” Joe said. Heat drove off the building and kinked the air and Peck felt his shirt latch to his back.”
― Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of the Year Volume Seven

“Sometimes God needs a sacrifice. Sometimes the road is complicit. No life is sacrosanct.”
― Ellen Datlow, The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Three