81 Short stories Quotes & Sayings with Wallpapers & Posters

Q: What is the best Short stories quote?

"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film." - Lorrie Moore

Q: What are some Short stories quotes?

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit." - David Sedaris "I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was . No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about." - Christopher Hitchens "Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row." - Ray Bradbury

Q: What are some short Short stories quotes?

"Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything." - Theodore Dreiser "Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to." - Eudora Welty "So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence." - Flannery O'Connor

Q: What is good short Short stories quote?

"For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock." - William H. Gass

The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.

Fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes Singapore Quotes The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One Quotes

All stories are the sin of their weaver.

Stories Quotes / Authorship Quotes Creative writing Quotes Short stories Quotes

Once when I asked you if you still loved your wife, you said, Love leaves the back door open. Later, you said, Love like a hospital gown opens at the back. And you slipped out.

Love Quotes / Affairs Quotes How to Stop Loving Someone Quotes Lovers Quotes Short stories Quotes

The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)

Humanity Quotes / Anthologies Quotes New york Quotes New york city Quotes People Quotes Short stories Quotes Winter Quotes

Straight is the line of Duty, Curved is the line of Beauty, Follow the straight line, thou shall see. The curved line ever follow thee.

Learning to Talk: Short Stories Quotes Short stories Quotes

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

Authors Quotes Novels Quotes Short stories Quotes Writers Quotes Writing Quotes

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

Reading Quotes / Novels Quotes Poetry Quotes Short stories Quotes Statesman Quotes

We lie to protect our children, and in lying we expose them to the greatest of harms

Horror Quotes Mystery Quotes Nocturnes Quotes Short stories Quotes Supernatural Quotes Thriller Quotes

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham

Science fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes The Seeds of Time Quotes The wheel Quotes

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams

War Quotes / Anzac Quotes Breathing spaces Quotes Cassino Quotes Heart Quotes In transit Quotes Selected Stories Quotes

Even if this spring the dappled leaves should shelter our minds from the moon's pale echo we would still remember how once they were sheltered by our skulls only from the day's sun and the night's stars and never from what we feared and what we remembered

Fear Quotes Memories Quotes Stars Quotes War Quotes / Anzac Quotes Breathing spaces Quotes In transit Quotes Night Quotes Selected storie Quotes Short stories Quotes

She shuffled with her head bowed, her dark eyes drifting to avoid contact, and she screamed in bed at night. (Dark City Lights)

Loneliness Quotes Sadness Quotes / Anthologies Quotes Life Quotes People Quotes Short stories Quotes Women Quotes

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth

Inspirational Quotes / Humorous quotes Quotes Odessa Quotes Pep talk Quotes Short stories Quotes Soviet literature Quotes Soviet union Quotes

Misery crouches beside me, ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and kind; terror flutters up, and it doesn't even frighten me anymore. And that'a the most desolate thing of all.

Short stories Quotes

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

Stories Quotes / Poetry Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes Symbols Quotes Writing Quotes

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

Short stories Quotes

Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.

Short stories Quotes

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

Short stories Quotes

What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.

Short stories Quotes Vampires in the Lemon Grove Quotes Women authors Quotes

Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.

Fantastic Quotes Humor relationships Quotes Short stories Quotes St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Quotes

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Novelist quotes Quotes Novels Quotes Short fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes Writing Quotes Writing process Quotes

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories Quotes American literature Quotes Fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes Southern Quotes

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Stories Quotes / Competence Quotes Mediocrity Quotes Short stories Quotes

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

Novels Quotes Short stories Quotes The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Quotes

There can't be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short the very idea of character seems to lose its significance, seems in fact to drop out of sight. We see human figures in a momentary flash. We see them in fleeting profile. We see them in archetypal climaxes which define their mode of existence. Situation tends to replace character, representative condition to replace individuality.("Introduction")

Flash fiction Quotes Short fiction Quotes Short Shorts Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ...Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state.Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ...Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively.Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room.There's often a brilliant overfocussing.("Introduction")

Flash fiction Quotes Short fiction Quotes Short Shorts Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts.LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short.SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc.LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation.("Introduction")

Flash fiction Quotes Short fiction Quotes Short Shorts Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

Humanity Quotes / Anthologies Quotes Dark City Lights: New York Short Stories Quotes Fiction Quotes Human nature Quotes New york city Quotes Short stories Quotes

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

Manhattan Noir Quotes Short fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes Writers Quotes Writing Quotes

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Fahrenheit twins Quotes Realism Quotes Short stories Quotes

I need to be a vampire," she said. "and I want one of them to make it happen. Michael will do fine. I don't care who turns me. The important thing is that if I change, I'll be a princess."I was wrong. She was really crazy.

All Hallows Quotes Crazy Quotes Eve rosser Quotes Michael glass Quotes მირანდა Quotes Morganville Quotes

I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)

Growth Quotes / Anthologies Quotes Life Quotes New york Quotes New york city Quotes Short stories Quotes

— А знаете ли какво се говори за вас? — попита тя. Омеро притеснено се намеси: — Това са лъжи. — И да, и не — каза президентът с неземно спокойствие. — Когато става въпрос за един президент, най-ужасните безчестия могат да са едновременно истина и лъжа.

Marques Quotes Politics Quotes President Quotes Short stories Quotes

Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.

Cancer Quotes Factotum Quotes Short stories Quotes Writing Quotes

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Novels Quotes Short stories Quotes Writing Quotes

Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.

Short stories Quotes

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Books Quotes Brevity Quotes Definition Quotes Novel Quotes Short Quotes Short stories Quotes

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Stories Quotes / On writing Quotes Short stories Quotes Writing Quotes

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

American writers Quotes Book lovers Quotes Reading habits Quotes Short stories Quotes

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

Fiction Quotes On fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes The Granta Book of the American Short Story Quotes Writing Quotes

In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.("Hard Candy")

Hard Candy Quotes Short stories Quotes Short story Quotes Writing Quotes

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

Fiction Quotes Prose Quotes Short stories Quotes

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

Reading Quotes / Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Quotes Short stories Quotes Thought Quotes Writing Quotes

I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]

Short stories Quotes The Secrets of a Fire King Quotes

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

Funny Quotes Short stories Quotes Too Much Happiness Quotes

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do -- we do it all the time.

Dear Life: Stories Quotes Literary fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes

You create your own reality.

Law of attraction Quotes Metaphysics Quotes Seema chandarana Quotes Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul Quotes Short stories Quotes

Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.

Initiation Quotes Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories Quotes Prose and Diary Excerpts Quotes Short stories Quotes

The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)

Humanity Quotes Loneliness Quotes / Alienation Quotes Aliens Quotes Anthologies Quotes Life Quotes Science fiction Quotes Short stories Quotes

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Angst Quotes Anonymity Quotes Born again Quotes Clean slate Quotes Extinction Quotes Family Quotes

81 Short stories Quotes & Sayings with Wallpapers & Posters - Quotes.Pub