Collection Of Short Stories Quotes

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

You want to hear an agent scream, say, 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.' ~ Daniel Woodrell

Just let me catch my breath, Red Macalister, and think. You've tipped my teapot handle over spout. ~ Debra Holland

Before he could decide what to do, he heard a female voice call out, "Pepe? Mack?"
Pepe recognized the voice as belonging to Senora Rodriguez. No, Senora Thompson. There'd been a wedding in late summer. He hurried out to the main part of the barn to see what she wanted.
Senora Thompson stood just inside the entrance, holding the reins of her mare, Bianca, a black beauty with four white stockings and a blaze down her nose her husband had given her after their marriage. ~ Debra Holland

I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect. ~ Melissa Peterman

Pepe absently thought, happy beyond words that he was actually holding hands with Lucia.
Passing a stall with a particularly pungent odor of manure made Pepe falter, realizing a barn wasn't the most romantic place to propose. Then he remembered the Savior born on this very night so long ago, and he figured if God could choose a stable for such an important miracle, he could too. ~ Debra Holland

Kalyug Briefs :
VOLUME I, II & III
A collection of Short Stories
Central Theme ::
What Your Sow, So Shall You Reap >
This is 100 percent true folks!

Download from Amazon Kindle! ~ Aparna Gangopadhyay

I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller. ~ Lynn Coady

grew up reading books where vampires were scary. This novel is an attempt to make them scary again. When I thought of the premise that became DRACULAS, I knew it needed to be a group project. Take four well-known horror authors, let them each create their own unique characters, and have them fight for their lives during a vampire outbreak at a secluded, rural hospital. This is NOT a collection of short stories. It's a single, complete novel. And it's going to freak you out. If you're easily disturbed, have a weak stomach, or are prone to nightmares, stop reading right now. There are no sexy teen heartthrobs herein. You have been warned. ~ Blake Crouch

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories. ~ James Webb Young

As the campfire radiated warmth in the opening of the lean-to, Red Macalister crouched before the burning logs. He added more wood to the blaze, then rocked back on his boot heels, studying the flames, and decided the fire would do for the next few hours to ward off the cold winter night. He glanced up at the black sky dotted with diamonds. A clear night. ~ Debra Holland

Apple of My Eye is a twisted collection of short stories by Amy Grech, including the sexy and deadly title story that makes you want to stay home with the door locked and the lights on. Grech's stories are sinister, sneaky, convoluted and dangerous - and absolutely not to be missed!
- Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author of
Ghost Road Blues and Dead Man's Song ~ Jonathan Maberry

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside. ~ Alice Munro

A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies. ~ John Cheever

Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people. ~ Zack Snyder

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest. ~ Diriye Osman

Louisa rested her head against his shoulder. She inhaled a happy breath and allowed herself to relax and let the connection between them seep into her body. ~ Debra Holland

Most conversations drift. You need to steer. Assume the task of cutting boring threads of conversation and of offering new options. Encourage people to tell stories they mention in passing. Don't wait to be invited into a group, introduce yourself. In short: lead. ~ Charlie Houpert

Davey Boy's Dead was given a new lease on life when doctors transplanted the Dynamite Kidney into his body. That new lease on life came to a sudden and rather hilarious end when the Dynamite Kidney exploded and tore a hole in Davey Boy's side. - The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Zombies ~ Darrin Mason

My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories. ~ Jane Lindskold

See Amazon's bio on don loedding and a review of his first book of short stories"The Search For the Bearded Clam" and read inside "Global Warming:The Iceman Cometh". ~ Donald R. Loedding

There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace. ~ Guy De Maupassant

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

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights) ~ Bill Bernico

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance. ~ F. Sionil Jose

O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature. ~ Guy De Maupassant

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,' she said, 'but I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam was her own underwear.' - 'Aunt Juliana's Indian ~ Petina Gappah

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother's deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn't tell, or told stories that weren't entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. ~ Pamela Erens

We do not know if she collapsed because of overwhelming joy, extreme surprise, grave disappointment, or heavy anxiety that for the next months and years she would live with a human male, because in fact she had been honest when she told her girlfriends that she had given up on men, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE. ~ Kyoko Yoshida

A love affair is like a short story
it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us. ~ John Cheever

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

I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't. ~ Ruth Rendell

In fashion, the time is so short, and even with pre-collection, there are not only dresses, shoes, bags, and furs but now raincoats and T-shirts. It's just an endless amount of work that we have to produce in no time. ~ Alber Elbaz

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two. ~ Dennis Lehane

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what. ~ Jennifer Weiner

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. ~ Gary Saul Morson

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea. ~ Laurie Frankel

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier. ~ Yiyun Li

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind. ~ Dudley Nichols

London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sit-coms, soaps and squibs, walking round hand in hand. ~ Martin Amis

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

I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling. ~ Peter Robinson

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:

'Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.' And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, 'the plain facts of [whose] situation - on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms - made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.' Orwell's writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values.

This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing - under the name Matt Lowe - for John Middleton Murry's Adelphi. As he told his diary:

I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist.

Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by - none other than Orwe ~ Christopher Hitchens

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir. ~ Anne Fadiman

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. ~ Ang Swee Chai

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive. ~ Elfriede Jelinek

As you might expect, the geographical location of the capital of Fairyland is fickle and has a rather short temper. I'm afraid the whole thing moves around according to the needs of narrative.'

September put her persimmon down in the long grass. 'What in the world does that mean?'

'I ... I SUSPECT it means that if we ACT like the kind of folk who would find a Fairy city whilst on various adventures involving tricksters, magical shoes, and hooliganism, it will come to us.'

September blinked. 'Is that how things are done here?'

'Isn't that how they're done in your world?'

September thought for a long moment. She thought of how children who acted politely were often treated as good and trustworthy, even if they pulled your hair and made fun of your name when grownups weren't around. She thought of how her father acted like a soldier, strict and plain and organized -- and how the army came for him. She thought of how her mother acted strong and happy even when she was sad, and so no one offered to help her, to make casseroles or watch September after school or come over for gin rummy and tea. And she thought of how she had acted just like a child in a story about Fairyland, discontent and complaining, and how the Green Wind had come for her, too.

'I suppose that is how things are done in my world. It's hard to see it, though, on the other side. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

As the bus passed a long stretch of coastline, for the first time I took no pleasure in the sight of it. The water was almost still and the sun seemed to be sinking into it. But this time the beauty wasn't enough. Usually just a glimpse of it could put me in an instant good mood, but now I realized - I'd always known, but never realized - that you can't escape to the sea. This isn't Han Shan's China or Thoreau's America. That's all gone now. If you decided you'd had enough and went off to live by the sea or up a mountain, you still couldn't get away from the need for money. They've made it so that money and sustenance are the same thing. ~ Barry Graham