Ellen Datlow Quotes

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 B...

I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art, she’d responded. Open the valve and the energy escapes.

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

It’s one of those stories that needs tellin’ because it’s heavy, Tom said. Tellin’ it makes it easier to carry.

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

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man but deteriorate the cat— Now

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

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

The Cinderella Game Kelly Link

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

This story is about the eschatology of shadow puppets.

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.

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

I’m too exhausted to sleep,

Merchant Bashir got up and plodded to a pile of rugs. He grabbed a kilim and unrolled it across the floor. A mosaic of black, yellow, and maroon geometries glimmered. He taught me rug weaving. It’s a...

Moral: If at first you don’t succeed, invent fire. Or hire a chef. Preferably one with imagination. Jane Yolen,

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

—Only fools and the dead never change their mind.

In the distance, over the cusp of the planets, a primordial paused, its mammoth body shimmering itself into perception. As I watched it, a dreadful certainty gripped me: this was how Gramps was trappe...

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. An...