Short Story Quotes - Page 2

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

It’s late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

So the question is, what can I do to motivate you, Polly?”She eyes me salaciously and I drop my gaze, unable to return the intensity. Gently, she uses one finger to lift my chin and make my eyes meet her own. They are a vivid blue and alive with desire for me. The air around us is charged and the tension is palpable. My soaking pussy is a testament to how much I already want her…“Well?” she asks, breaking my train of thought. I gaze at her face; just a few inches from mine.“I – I’ve never done this before…”“Done what Polly?” Rachel chides, removing her finger. I miss the contact immediately and am rueful to have upset her. She raises one eyebrow at me. “Thought about what motivates you?” she asks, sardonically.“I’ve never been like this… with a woman, I mean…”She rises from the sofa in one fluid movement and stands above me.“Kneel Polly.”Surprised by the order, I blink at her before I respond.“Excuse me?”Rachel smiles at me.“Get. On. Your. Knees,” she says, articulating each word, and pointing to the floor in front of her. “I am going to find a way to motivate you.

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.

Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.

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.

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.

He'd done this hundreds of times: done a job, been drugged with a narcotic that erased his short term memory, and dumped in a seedy hole in the wall locale, where when he climbed out, he would have to figure out where he was, find a payphone, and call in for his next job.

Given our new situation, I think you should find a more appropriate way to address me Polly. Do so now please.”I don’t even have to think. An invisible shroud of submission seems to have fallen over me and the prospect of surrendering to this beautiful creature is the only thing on my mind, because I do – absolutely – want her to fuck me, and I have never wanted anything so much…

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

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.

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

Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.

The last clear thought I have is of my grandmother’s rust-colored wall clock ticking away in the darkness of my apartment—my sanctuary where I dreamed and desired and hoped for goodness and love. I wonder how long that clock will tick without anyone around to hear it. I wonder if maybe I should have taken my grandmother’s silverware or jewelry instead. I wonder – if I knew then what I know now – if I still would have approached Jade that first night and invited her into my life, only to watch as she took it from me and fed it to some Godless thing, as my mother had called it. Would I still have given myself over to her, knowing it would end the same way, with the barbaric flicker of hope that this time she could love me?

But men are funny about their wars, they act as if they own them, and perhaps they do, for I don't think women ever start them.

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.

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.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself

It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man *would* have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.

Inside the room there sat a rocker, which she sat on, and which had rocked her while she sipped the beer, because in spite of herself she had become so giddy to have so quickly relieved her heart that she allowed herself to lean backwards while in the rocker, which had made it possible for the rocker to rock her, although it was not her intention to be so rocked. Also there stood an ironing board with a still hot iron on it that was burning a yellow shift, and there was, among several items that were not as noticeable to the woman, and yet were noticeable enough to at least bear mention, a fake man."I hope you don't mind me asking," said the woman who lived in the room, but then while in her chair she nodded off.

I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.

The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn’t seen in a long time, passion.

She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.

Light has a voice?” Sarucha inquired, amazed.

The father and daughter made their way north, through unknown sylvan paradises where only the owls and skunks know their way around. The hard work of paddling non-stop for many hours had long since stopped being difficult for Saweyimew. In spite of her beauty and grace, her back had grown strong and sinewy from years of canoe trips. She reveled in the exhilaration it always brought her, after the first few hours left her body insensible to pain or discomfort. Warm and tingly, lulled into peaceful contemplation by hours of the rhythmic paddling, the smell of the water, exotic blooms, animal musk. It all combined as one to make her feel so alive. Especially when it rained, and her body steamed against the cool drops, feeling invincible against the elements. The mountain of her father's back was like a rock against anything nature could throw against them. The stream of fragrant pipe-smoke still flowing from his lips, regardless of any obstacle. She felt at that moment, nothing would ever stop her father's pipe from smoking. Nothing, not death, not any force of the living or spirit world, would ever still her father's heart. Rain cleansing her to the core, she was a spring of raw power and self-reliance, paddling against all adversity--their master completely. Her father's daughter. At times like that, when it rained, she entirely understood and shared her father's outlook on life.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

I’m mistaken….for thinking you were someone with a heart worth breaking.

I have nothing I want to ask you, and if I did, you would probably lie anyway.”“I’m drunk. Drunk people tell the truth.”“Like hell they do. Besides you’re not that drunk.”“Then dare me something.”I snorted. “No, because I’m not that drunk, or stupid.

Perhaps he found it strange being accompanied by a Chinese-Nigerian arms trafficking pirate, but the Irish priest had just followed me silently on board the covert government transport.

The heart's the trouble. It knows the monster but remembers the love.

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

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

Let’s start over shall we? Hello gorgeous. I’m Justin McKinley. I’m head baker at Le Chef Petite. I’d love to get to know you better. Can I seduce you with my vast knowledge of sweet and sensual desserts?”Alicia couldn’t help it. She giggled. One of those girly, I’ve-been-flirting bubbly

I’ve never been a believer in fate. I like to think I’m in control, that my life hasn’t been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times.

This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.

As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial.

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.

And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you’ll be playing with the neighbor’s puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll start hiccupping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor’s house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you’ll shriek and start laughing again. It will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring.

And yet it was also true that the tumor could not be removed by our doctor, and as a result of that a strange medication had been given him that enabled my brother to become even more of an enigma than he was before, and as a result of that there came to exist not only the machine and the inertia that came with it, but a change of perspective among the townsfolk that was a result of their interactions with the various phases of my brother. And so it was that when the flood began to rear its terrible head, not only was there the inertia that we all had to deal with, but a sense of the sublime that we had begun to feel for the waters which had roared upon the horizon.

As he carefully made his way back to the stairs and awkwardly turned off the light, he did not notice that the dark shadow he had assumed was his reflection remained in the mirror. He didn’t see the hands press against the surface and make large, liquid-like bulges beneath the glass. Nor did he hear the whispers that so suddenly and violently filled the dark, cluttered space as he had closed and locked the heavy attic door. ~ "The Mirror

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

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.

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

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

How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? —how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate.

Thank you father, thank you. I know you watched me from above and protected me. I promise I shall serve the Magnarian Confederation with all my body and soul. I shall dedicate myself fully to our confederation, the family that you so loved. And I love it too. I shall protect, love and respect it always. This is my promise and commitment. Thank you

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

Alice is fictional. This isn't.

If I could do all of that on February 14th, it would be a personal best for me. Something to share with my crew for the glory and the laughs, or to cheer up the next buddy of mine to get dumped or cheated on. From "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: A Short Story

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.

He paused, giving her a sweet smile of understanding. "You don't have to start with the crown jewels, you know. You could start with my lips then work your way down.

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

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.