Short Stories Quotes

“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

“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

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.”
― Clark Zlotchew

“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, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The television set then came after her, chomping its teeth.  Upon reaching the living room, the television succeeded at eating her body bit-by-bit: first the legs, then the body, and finally her flailing arms.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.”
― Andre Dubus

“Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, Judges and Justices all fall prey to the Hitman.”
― RB Le `Deach, My Graphic Bipolar Fantasies: & Other Short Stories

“She tossed him a small mirror so that he could see the results, and what he saw horrified him.  The boiling concoction left a deep trail of burnt skin that stretched from the crown of his head all the way to his chin – almost like an artificial sluice that burned his flesh to form a large rivulet that ran down the center of his face.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“She likes me.  I can tell.  Problem is, she won’t admit that to the boyfriends she brings over.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“It seemed as though he would never pull free, until he awoke one morning feeling kind of awkward, as though his hands had been lopped off by some Arabian sword during a routine druggie blackout, and in their place, pale and membranous hands that had been fit to his wrists by aliens that took him up while he slept and then brought him back down – all of it in an effort to help him move up to where he belonged in society.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“She is the kind and friendly sort, but I’m an old man at this point, so it would be useless and somewhat illegal if I asked her out.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“She put all of her weight against the sill of the balcony, her lovesick heart ready and willing to join the man she loved.  She closed her eyes and pushed herself forward.  From three stories high, she plummeted to the earth.  Before hitting the ground, she swore she saw him, racing down from the heavens and lifting her up towards God’s domain where lovers never ceased to rule.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“Once inside my skull, my doctor added some salt, just to taste.  He also poured some fruit into my skull – an apple, a pear, a few seedless grapes, and a ripe banana.  He then used an electric blender set on its highest speed to create what he had termed ‘a yogurt parfait.’  After he finished blending the ingredients, he beckoned the other doctors and a few of the nurses to sample his new concoction.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”
― Eudora Welty

“One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“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.”
― Junot Diaz

“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.”
― Alexandar Tomov, Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth

“Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.”
― Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots

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

“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Eighty-year-old granny protects her right to vote with a shotgun.”
― RB Le `Deach, My Graphic Bipolar Fantasies: & Other Short Stories

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”
― Clark Zlotchew, Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties

“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.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The old outcast gape the darkness and said: “The lonely man is a fire without fireplace…”.”
― Alexandar Tomov

“I want to spank you, but also want to know you want it. I need to hear it sweetheart, tell me you deserve it…”
― Felicity Brandon, Friday's Lesson

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“As though you read my mind, you steady my head
between your hands and eye me intensely. Then your
mouth is on mine, hungry and aggressive. Your teeth
skim my lips, claiming me and I feel your tongue probing
inside of my mouth. The kiss ends as dramatically as it
began, leaving me reeling and wanting more.”
― Felicity Brandon, Friday's Lesson