Best 281 quotes in «short story quotes» category

The Scottish sun, shocked by having its usual cloudy underpinnings stripped away, shone feverishly, embarrassed by its nakedness.

The smiting and righteous retribution happens less often than you would think - Hades

The strange unfamiliar feeling she’d had increased as they approached. She nervously twisted the amethyst ring on her middle finger. Aunt Gilly’s ring. It felt hot against her skin.

The strikes continue ruthlessly. I brace for each blow, numbering it as the heat subsides, and enjoying her tender exploration of my swollen lips in between. The rhythm pulls me through the assault and, all too soon, I acknowledge the tenth strike.

The truth is I’m a chicken shit coward who’s afraid of a girl like you. When I’m with you, I want things I never thought I’d be able to have, or deserved, and that scares me a little. I’m just a regular guy who works in a bar and you’re this beautiful person who shines brighter than the stars. I think I just made up some cheesy poetry so I’ll stop while I’m ahead. If you feel like talking, give me a call. ~D Sophie sat down on the floor and, through blurry eyes, reread the note so many times she had it memorized. She was going to do more than give him a call.

The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children.

Vieron al anciano atravesar los raíles del tranvía; con pasos torpes, como si tropezara, encaminarse al parterre del centro de la plaza. Atravesó la primera hilera de coches detenidos y se adentró en la zona despejada. Súbitamente cayó de bruces, como si le hubieran dado un empujón. Pero, aparte de él, en la plaza no se veía un alma. Se oyó el impacto. Quedó tendido en el asfalto con los brazos extendidos y la cara contra el suelo. De lejos parecía una gigantesca cucaracha aplastada.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

This was getting uglier by the minute, I thought. There really was no easy escape, since we were sitting far from the exit and the waiters knew me from prior dinner dates with Ashley and I hadn't paid the tab yet. From: "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you―what a pain is this! And yet! He stood there aloof and alone, staring hopelessly at a drawn blind and making, in his distraction, as though he could look out. But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full...

To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

Toraf nods in all seriousness. “Humans eat sand. That’s why they spend so much time on land”.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

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")

Toward nightfall, Khrenov’s temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle’s wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window—her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly—all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night.

We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years

We did not go about this bride thing right. I do not think women are still used to being stolen as they once were.” “Some adjustment is to be expected.” “It is more than that. She keeps asking for things that I do not have—her Earth clothes and something called a cheeseburger, which I recall from the mini shows as being a giant food that women enjoy eating half naked very slowly.” Kyran thought of Eve’s beautiful legs. He would very much enjoy getting her a cheeseburger

Well, how did you die, then?” the old man finally asked. “Die?” Matthew threw back. “Are you crazy? I’m not dead. I’m just very late.

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.

Well why don't you lean over this counter a little more and give me your best kiss, and then I'll tell you if I want you to take me out to dinner.

We pick the people who populate our personal lives as much for who they make us as for who they are. I chose Anna for the person I became in her presence, and in this respect, my love for her was a more selfish one

While I AM sure of what I want, I'm equally unsure of how to attain it.

When I watch a movie or read a book, be it a melodrama or horror, I always hate the female character... Well, most of the time I do. Why? Because she is always dumb. I shit you not. For example in this one chick-flick movie, "Serendipity", Sara tells that Jonathan guy that she won't give him her number because if they are meant to meet again, they will. Seriously? Romantic movie my ass, there's not anything romantic in letting go of someone when you can grab them with both of your hands. That is not romantic, THAT is stupid. In another movie the girl storms out, never hearing the guy out, just like in that one book I've been reading recently, "Tangled". Now this is an issue with most of the books and chick-flicks. Like why? Why won't you stop a minute, take a deep breath, count to ten and listen to the guy. Only after that, for God's sake, say ‘fuck you’ then ‘Namaste’ and then walk away while swaying your hips like there is no tomorrow? Let them know what they will be missing for the rest of their lives. In some other movies I hate the main female character because of the scriptwriters. The girl somehow always appears in front of the guy out of nowhere. Like he can be walking down the street and then boom! ABRACADABRA! The main girl bumps into him in NYC out of all places. They make it seem like whatever they do their steps always bring them back to each other. Dumb, I know.

Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.

Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle’s tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube. “Fib!” Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest.

words rarely mean much when it comes to trust.

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable… …a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind telling you so. “If he’d just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long…” —from “The Temptations of St. Anthony,” by Donald Barthelme

Yield, and I'll eat your little pussy... first.

Yet he received this love with joy, surrendered himself to it, and cherished it with all the strength of his being; for he knew that love made one vital and rich, and he longed to be vital and rich, far more than he did to work tranquilly on anything to give it permanent form.

Writing Skinny Chris was a very odd process – it felt like I had brought back to life a dead man and then killed him again.

You are the only thing I've ever needed. The only treasure that matters. - Seamus Tierney

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

You land a second strike, this time just on my left cheek. It feels hard already and stings like hell. I imagine the red mark it has left on my behind as I thank you. As the belt catches my right buttock, I squeeze my eyes shut. I know my tears are close. You strike me again and again. You vary the location and the intensity; somehow never letting me settle into a pattern with the pain. I try to keep count in mind, but after fifteen I am lost in the hot, stinging sensation of my behind.

You gently lift my chin with one finger and stare deep into my eyes. Automatically I drop my gaze to avoid eye contact with you, but not before I see the debauchery loaded in your expression. “Whose slut are you?” you ask, “and you have permission to look at me whilst you reply.” I glance up at you quickly and take a moment to absorb your beautiful face before you deprive me of it again. “I am your slut, Master – only yours.” Your eyes burn into mine and you too pause to relish your utter possession of me.

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you.

Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.

You will get exactly what you deserve Polly,” comes the firm reply, “you can trust me on that… But if you do – trust me I mean – I promise you an unparalleled climax.” She pauses, gazing deep into my frightened green eyes. “It’s your call Polly, all yours.” I allow my aching body to decide for me . “Punish me please, mistress,” I say in a very small voice.

I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings.

I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.