Short Stories Quotes

Why is it so hard? It's hard because it matters, I think.

Do you mind?” she asked.“Mind what?”“While you were looking in the mirror I couldn’t help myself and I began fantasizing about you. And I figured if I was going to continue to fantasize about you, the only polite thing to do was to ask your permission. So now I’m doing the polite thing again and asking, ‘do you mind?’”“No, Nina. I don’t mind at all.”Then she leaned down and kissed him.

History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)

He was getting undressed and it snapped something inside of him that had been drawing taut, ready to break for months.“I'm hungry, Bruno,” he said, in a soft voice, as he removed the shirt from his broad shoulders, revealing a perfect sight of smooth dark skin. “I can't wait for dinner,” he continued, with a smile.When he put his hands to the fastening of his trousers, Bruno let out a sigh and put the take out menus on the counter. He couldn't look at him, because he knew Lyon was trying to seduce him on purpose. He didn't want to talk or hear him out or spend time with him that didn't end with an orgasm.“I can't do this anymore,” Bruno confessed, quietly.

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

I want to spank you, but also want to know you want it. I need to hear it sweetheart, tell me you deserve it…

We should follow every supply that runs into the particular lake below, going upstream in terms of we can. When we do not find Drakes’ path, or even an additional, we should come back straight along,look yourself upward an additional way to obtain foods,and then do a similar for the next water for the south.

But I want to assure you, if it’s your last day on earth, even after 2,000 years, I strongly suggest you go for the Versace leaf halter dress.

Jaxton smiled and caught his hand, holding it tight in both of his. “Are you burnt out? Is it all too much?” he asked, getting straight to the root of the matter, in one go.“Yes,” he sighed, hating that it was true.“Then you'll stay home.”“You know I can't. It's impossible,” Roman complained about the unfairness of it all.He was due to return to the studio in two days times, to finalise the tracks he'd recorded yesterday. Then he had to sit down with Jalen next week, to pick out a new piece of his artwork for the next album cover. And two weeks after that, he had three interviews with three different music channels, to film.“Try telling that to Ben.” Jaxton winked at him, then ducked down to kiss him.~ From the Heart

I been starin' at the back a Jimmy Nelson's head for four grades now and I been noticin' how his blond hair curls against the skin on his neck and the birthmark shaped like a half-moon I wanna press my fingernail into.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.

The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

WORSHIP IS ACTION.Worship is not lazy, boring and sad.Worship is zealous, famous and joyful.Psalm 66:1-2Shout joyfully to God, all the earth; Sing the glory of His name; Make His praise glorious.1 Corinthians 6:20For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.Psalm 107:32Let them extol Him also in the congregation of the people, And praise Him at the seat of the elders.

Sometimes I help him out and sometimes he helps me out, and sometimes he tries to push me through the wall. (Dark City Lights)

Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.

Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.

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...

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

Sometimes I wonder which is worse: "To have to kill because it is your job, or to have no remorse for all the murderous things you have done?

I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.

I have this uncanny knack of falling for the most irrelevant men,my love story would be comprising of short stories.

Lost Cactus is simply an urban myth.

The time groaned by as John made a fool of himself. Eventually, he grew numb to the death and sin around him. He even came to enjoy gallivanting cross-country like a true crusader. His name brought tears of joy or pain of anger to those he left in his wake. The result of his own unresolved pain.

Ty is green but never with envy. Best of all, he's usually available to help move a heavy piece of furniture.

We do not know if she collapsed because of overwhelming joy, extreme surprise, grave disappointment, or heavy anxiety that for the next months and years she would live with a human male, because in fact she had been honest when she told her girlfriends that she had given up on men, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE.

The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.The drought had persisted for over a month.

At least a hospital stay will give him an excuse to halt the job hunt.

Quote from “Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth”: “The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings".

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

An optimist and a gentleman, I like that in my men.

Remove the computer chipslodged in your brain before they convince youthat you’ve gone insane…Take a bite out of realityinstead of becominga reality byte.

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies,” Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray.“You weren't saying that last night,” Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. “In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth,” he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room.Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips.Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss.~ From the Heart

She pulls me further down. More trapped souls reach out to us, dressed in clothes from decades past. The girl ignores them as we descend along the timeline – decade by decade – towards the birth of the island.

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

She knew breaking up with Ethan was going to be a full-time job because being in a relationship with him had also been a full-time job.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

We skipped right over Walmart on the ladder down.

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.

In high school, she’d been the loner fat girl and I’d been the asshole jock. There had always been something between us; we had gotten on so easily. I remember being both confused and upset that when I’d finally experienced that thing everyone called chemistry, it had been with her of all people.

Love does not choose belief, place, time, situations, or race. love happens between two souls.

It was as if my sould had left my body, floated up to the ceiling, and was watching me destroy my own career with one deliberately assaultive punch. (Dark City Lights)

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.

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.

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

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

I'm looking for something new to believe in that isn't the way people yearn at night in the city.

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights)

I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don't forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and feminine.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.

With more time spent in their mother's presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie's own facile mental questioning and creative drive, paired with her physical rigidity, all the more oppositional, and, how they dance around serious subjects, laughable.

The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold.

She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her