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Short Stories Quotes

Browse 262 quotes about Short Stories.

Short Stories Quotes

“from THE PAUSE BETWEEN One day the dragonflies appear sudden as the sun. Speed and softness, they lash sky to air in silent seams. One's barred wings and abdomen are pressing to the warm dock's slats. Another lights on the Chekhov book you bought me, not realizing, like everything, it is a short story, too.”

LoveAbsenceShort StoriesDocksChekhovDragonflies
Book:Reincarnation & Other Stimulants: Life, Death, & In-Between Poems
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“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.”

FictionPoliticianShort StoriesDroughtPioneerS Rajaratnam
Book:The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam
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“There is only one illness that pushes both the well-wheeled and the un-wheeled to seek out the prophet. It is the big disease with the little name, the sickness that no one dies of, the disease whose real name is unspoken, the sickness that speaks its presence through the pink redness of lips, the slipperiness of hair, through the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended.”

Short StoriesZimbabwePetina Gappah
Book:An Elegy for Easterly: Stories
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“She looked around for something with which to cut the cord. There was nothing, and the baby almost slipped from her hands. Through a film of tears she chewed on Martha’s flesh, closing her mind to the taste of blood, she chewed and tugged on the cord until the baby was free. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The baby cried, she held it to her chest, and felt an answering rise in her chest. – ‘An Elegy for Easterly”

Short StoriesPetina GappahZimbabe
Book:An Elegy for Easterly: Stories
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“I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.”

StoriesImmigrantsTexasFamily RelationshipsLatinoShort StoriesImmigrant ExperienceShort Story CollectionChicanoSergio TroncosoHispanic AmericanImmigrant FictionEl Paso TexasHispanic Identity
Book:The Last Tortilla & Other Stories
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“This used to be a great country. Not now. Not anymore. I was laid off from the drugstore. Worked there almost thirty years. Worked my way up from the bottom, from Stock Boy to Manager, with little in the way of education -- I didn't graduate high school, was a semester shy when my dad got sick. I ran that damned place for the owner, Bud Wilkins. Then, when Bud retired, and had no one to carry on the business, this big chain bought him out and they discarded me like a badly worn sneaker." --From the story "After the Layoff," included in forthcoming story collection BROTHERS, FATHERS, AND OTHER STRANGERS”

FictionWorkersCorporationsShort StoriesLayoffs
Author:Mitchell Waldman
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“His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong Li, but now that she was middle-aged, she had put on weight and gradually taken on more of a bell-shaped look, resembling Li Siqin. But no matter what, a wife always looks better than her balding, broadbellied husband.”

FictionChineseShort StoriesSingaporeEnglishTranslationCultural MedallionGong LiLi Siqin
Book:Other Cities, Other Lives
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“She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.”

LiteratureFictionShort StoriesSingaporeLighthouseEpigram Books
Book:Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
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“The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.”

FictionShort StoriesSingaporeKaren Kwek
Book:Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
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“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.”

FictionMental IllnessShort StoriesSingaporeCyril Wong
Book:Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
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“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.”

FictionShort StoriesSingaporeFlash Fiction
Book:The Space Between the Raindrops
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“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.”

WomenRelationshipsShort Stories
Book:Kicky-Wicky
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“I made many decisions, some awful and others brilliant, but I found ways to keep that openness in my soul that meant more to me than breathing. I told them over the years what I was doing, how I was trying what no one in my family had ever tried to do. When I was failing, I admitted that as well, and they listened politely. I also knew that’s all they could do. One lonely night in Connecticut, I pulled myself from a window’s ledge. No one else next to me. Another day I chose to do something someone like me should have never accomplished, and yet I did, and kept going. I learned to recognize when others, like Jean, were much better than me, because they had faith in my soul. I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant’s son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me.”

StoriesImmigrantsStoryShort StoriesImmigrant ExperienceSergio TroncosoImmigrant FictionShort Story Writing
Book:A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son
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“The short story is that which, like a flash of lightning, pierces right through while establishing a viewpoint; without any other machinations, simply gestures with a finger to awaken dormant emotions; creates an entirely new imaginary world around the reader. The novel says whatever it wants. The short story, by rousing the imagination and emotions, only alludes to or provides a spark of whatever it wants to say. This is why the writer of the short story needs a reader who is impressible, emotional, swift and intelligent; to such a reader, he will be forever in debt.”

Short StoriesShort Story WritingShort Story Versus Novel
Book:The Shehnai Virtuoso and Other Stories
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“Zachary looked down into the swirling morass that was his beer as the man walked onto the stage and started to play a solo piece, the band respectfully allowing him to start off his set by staking his claim. Zachary would give him staking his claim. He had his guitar nestling close by his side, as always, the leather of the case gently touching his calf, sending an almost erotic charge through his body every time he moved like the less than innocent brush of a future lover's hand on a bare arm.”

MusicShort StoriesRobert Johnson
Book:Black Box
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“And that one guy, Martin that everyone liked, well he had a gash above his right eye and bruising near his jawline making him look even more corrupt. It took a moment for me to remember hearing he was a boxer. He caught me staring and stared back. No blinking. No movement. Just staring. Staring. I looked away blushing. From my periphery I could see him raise a hand to the cut above his eye then quickly shove his fists into the front pockets of his jeans. I turned my head to catch his eyes fall to the floor. It looked like he was focused on the leg of a barstool, but I think I saw a smile split his face.”

RomanceShort StoriesFiction WritingChildren Of AlcoholicsOvercoming The Past
Book:Bring Me To Life
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“I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we tried every position and every angle. I explored the curves on her body and delighted in seeing the freedom of her ecstasy. Her desperate whispers and pleas. I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me too. We lay in bed with our limbs entangled, in a pacific silence that reminded me of existing on a beach just for the sake of such an existence. I couldn't imagine the world ever becoming better, and for some strange reason the thought slipped into my head that I had suddenly grown to be an old man because I could only hope to repeat, but never improve on, a night like this. I finally took her home sometime when the interstate was empty, and the bridges seemed to lead to nowhere, for they were desolate too.”

LoveStoriesLiteratureRelationshipsLoversLove StoryLatinoShort StoriesHispanicMexican AmericanChicanoSergio TroncosoMexican Americans
Book:The Last Tortilla & Other Stories
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“It’s no surprise that small romances began to bubble up throughout the lab. At the time, it seemed to make sense. It wasn’t long before our working together in such close proximity, together with the general excitement of the task at hand, led to lingering glances over calorimeters, colleagues leaning in to share the dual eyepieces on comparison microscopes, the sudden, accidental brush of hands simultaneously attempting to adjust the needle valves of Bunsen burners. When we examined some of the pollen we found in Loeka’s colon, it turned out the cells within the pollen were still intact, which meant that Loeka’s death could be placed sometime during the spring. Spring!”

HumorFictionShort StoriesScientistsMummies
Book:The Great Frustration
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