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Short Fiction Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Short Fiction.

Short Fiction Quotes

“The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division. ("Introduction")”

WritingCharacterWriterWritersCrime FictionFiction WritingNoirNoir FictionCornell WoolrichShort Fiction
Book:Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
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“But what if everyone assumes they're doomed to die, no survivors? What if the plane is breaking up, and the smoky sky leaks through the cracks, and there’s a piercing screech in the wind? There’s the promise of disintegration, of body parts scattered across hundreds of kilometres of wilderness, and teddy bears, and a debris field filmed from a helicopter, families weeping in nearby airports, framed on the front page, last names later chiseled into a marble memorial. That would be so much worse, that moment you realize no one’s going to make it, everyone’s going to die, because no survivors means the end of your world, ugliness all the way down, fear and its resulting cruelty, until the wings slice the treetops and the cabin bursts into flames. No survivors is the end of everything.”

CrimeNoirDark FictionShort Fiction
Book:The High-Rise in Fort Fierce
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“If they die here together, starved like prisoners, she hopes he’ll come with her to find her legs. She hopes he can swim. But even if he can’t, she’s sure he’ll learn once the water touches his toes. The knowledge will come to his body, like in a dream. She imagines the two of them swimming side by side in an endless sea, an epic of water below them, billion of colourful fish joining their adventure. There would be an island eventually. They would wade ashore and pick fruit from the trees.”

HorrorDark FictionShort FictionSpec
Book:A Plea for Constant Motion
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“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.”

InspirationalInspirational QuotesReaderAppetiteShort StoryDelightfulLiterary FictionInspirational LivingShort StoriesReadersLiteraryShortReadershipTastyShort Story CollectionReaders And WritersLiterary QuotesTapasGastronomyAppetite For LifeAppetitesReaders And WritingShort FictionReaders And ReadingEquivalentLiterary QuoteReaders FavoriteDelightful QuoteLiterary InspirationAssortmentsAssortmentCanapésMezzeMorselsTasty Treats
Book:Impromptu Scribe
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“The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah’s life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being. --from short story ELIJAH’S SKIN”

Short StoryMetaphysicalParablesShort FictionPhilosophical Inquiry
Book:I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
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