Christmas Short Stories Quotes

Who would have thought God would send a bad man and a sheriff just to save Prince? ~ Debra Holland

Barbara preferred to decorate the tree early instead of waiting for Christmas Eve, saying she wanted to have some time to enjoy the tree prior to the actual holiday. So three days before Christmas, she set Abe and the children to stringing popcorn, while she carefully unwrapped the glass ornaments from Germany that Robert brought down from the attic. ~ Debra Holland

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. ~ Herman Melville

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. ~ Robert Scholes

You can't change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can't change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise. ~ Norman Mailer

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way. -The Wheel, John Wtndham ~ John Wyndham

Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop. ~ John Hopkins

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her. ~ Mary Papas

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

BE what you wish to see! ~ Wayne C. Long

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets. ~ Charles De Lint

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ~ Harold Ross

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels. ~ Jonathan Coe

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2. ~ O. Henry

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously. ~ Mal Peet

Steve's throat swelled with tension as the intimacy of the moment became more tangible. He moved his eyes from the dark, reflective river, to the dark, reflective pupils in Diane's eyes. They seemed to quiver with tenderness - but then they would grow distant. He found himself continually surprised at the "aliveness" of the person standing just a foot away from him now. She wasn't inanimate: she would flinch if he pinched her, and answer if he asked her. And she was beautiful."
From "The Grand Unified Story"
a short story in Zack Love's Stories and Scripts: an Anthology ~ Zack Love

I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story ... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story. ~ Judi Dench

About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party, I passed out for a minute - passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional - and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is. ~ Brock Clarke

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision. ~ Louise Bogan

The voices of all the lost, all the Indians, metis, hunters, Mounted Police, wolfers, cowboys, all the bundled bodies that the spring uncovered and the warming sun released into the stink of final decay; all the starving, freezing, gaunt, and haunted men who had challenged this country and failed; all the ghosts from smallpox-stilled Indian camps, the wandering spirits of warriors killed in their sleep on the borders of the deadly hills, all the skeleton women and children of the starving winters, all the cackling, maddened cannibals, every terrified, lonely, crazed, and pitiful outcry that these plains had ever wrung from human lips, went wailing and moaning over him, mingled with the living shouts of the foreman and the old-timer, and he said, perhaps aloud, remembering the legend of the Crying River, and the voices that rode the wind there as here, Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle? ~ Wallace Stegner

Quinn Cummings is a master story-teller and her book is nothing short of delightful. Her insights into topics like celebrity, parenting, and cats with a taste for homicide are pithy and uproarious and not to be missed. Notes from the Underwire is charming, hilarious, and just snarky enough to be ultimately satisfying. ~ Jen Lancaster

Paoletta turned to him with a dark face.
You'd better watch out, Chase. He's passed over to the evil side. ~ Stefania Mattana

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

I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story. ~ Lorin Stein

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

Well it's been about 100 years and every attempt at a comics writers' union has failed miserably. There is, sadly, a long history of short-term thinking and self-destructive behavior among my fellow comic book creators. No matter how many horror stories they have heard they won't even go so far as to hire themselves a lawyer when they need it. It breaks my heart. I am a very proud union member of the Writers Guild. And I can't imagine my fellow comic creators being able to pull something like this together. ~ Brian Michael Bendis

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I've also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too. ~ Chayada Welljaipet

Many of my better short stories are just the last chapters of novels I did not write. ~ Roger Zelazny

I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write. ~ James Rollins

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories. ~ Eric Brown

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery ... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month ~ Isaac Asimov

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays ... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again. ~ Ray Bradbury

Quote from "FUTURE GONE":
" ... I set the house on fire. It's dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where.
And suddenly I understand ...
All dreams are dead now". ~ Alexandar Tomov

I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories. ~ Nicholas Royle

Inspiration for my short stories grows from a psychic kernel, a vision of some sort or an eccentric, colorful dream. ~ Lawren Leo

I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do. ~ Frank Deford

I picked up my volume of Collected Stories and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe. I sprawled across the bed and flipped through the pages until I came to one of my favorite short stories: "The Oval Portrait. ~ Crystal Smith Gordon

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. ~ Brian D. McLaren

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading. ~ Maria Montessori

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. ~ Justin Ker

The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge. ~ Amy Bloom

On the Writing Process:
When in doubt, take it out., ~ Barbara DaCosta

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

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. ~ Ann Patchett

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing. ~ Carol Windley

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children. ~ Helen Dunmore

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. ~ Haruki Murakami

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because
I don't know why. ~ Anton Chekhov