Juggernaut Short Story Quotes

Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith. ~ Rick Bass

Alexandra gasped and fell backwards. The blood drained from her face as ice tracked through her veins. She scrambled back to the keyhole and stared at the men in the room. ~ Ellen Read

Are you planning to go into writing as a career?'
'Yes, yes, that's what this is all about for me. I'm planning to write another short story this weekend. Have you read Hemingway by the way?'
'Oh yes. Part of growing up.'
'A bit like that, yes. Straight to the point. Simple and clear. With weight behind it. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, "I kill people." This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from my seat-mate. Only peace and quiet. Rare is the fellow passenger who asks why I do it.

I suppose I got tired hanging out in a book all day waiting for a story to begin. I write the kind of novels I want to read. And why the theme of solving murders? Violent death is larger than life and it's the great equalizer. By law, every victim is entitled to a paladin and a chase, else life would be cheapened.

And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life. If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum... but I have never done that.

The heart of my theory has puritan roots: if you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work. ~ Carol O'Connell

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form. ~ Edith Wharton

She knew there were only small joys in life
the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through
and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off. ~ Lorrie Moore

In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story. ~ David Bergen

The Two Towers especially, and the first part of The Return of the King, have a structure reminiscent on a large scale of 'The Council of Elrond' on a small one. The word that describes the structure is 'interlace'. Tolkien certainly knew the word, for it has become a commonplace of Beowulf-criticism, but he may not have liked it much: it is associated also with the structure of French prose romance, in which he took little interest. However, Tolkien certainly also knew that the Icelandic word for a short story is a Þáttr, literally a thread. One could say that several Þaettir, or threads, twisted round each other, make up a saga; and Gandalf comes close to saying something like that when he says to Théoden, 'There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question' (my emphasis). Tolkien may have felt that there had been all along a native version of the French technique of entrelacement, even if we no longer know the native word for it. But word, or no word, he was going to do it. ~ Tom Shippey

So the question is, what can I do to motivate you, Polly?"

She eyes me salaciously and I drop my gaze, unable to return the intensity.
Gently, she uses one finger to lift my chin and make my eyes meet her own. They are a vivid blue and alive with desire for me. The air around us is charged and the tension is palpable. My soaking pussy is a testament to how much I already want her…

"Well?" she asks, breaking my train of thought. I gaze at her face; just a few inches from mine.

"I – I've never done this before…"

"Done what Polly?" Rachel chides, removing her finger.
I miss the contact immediately and am rueful to have upset her. She raises one eyebrow at me.

"Thought about what motivates you?" she asks, sardonically.

"I've never been like this… with a woman, I mean…"

She rises from the sofa in one fluid movement and stands above me.

"Kneel Polly."

Surprised by the order, I blink at her before I respond.

"Excuse me?"

Rachel smiles at me.

"Get. On. Your. Knees," she says, articulating each word, and pointing to the floor in front of her.
"I am going to find a way to motivate you. ~ Felicity Brandon

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

It is the illusion of magic and the magic of illusion that we are primarily interested in- not the privy tricks or the key to the secrets themselves. We seek the bafflement, the contradictions, the amusements, and the innumerable emotions that ripple uneasily through the audience. It is not knowledge we are after, but mystery and disguises. We want to gaze at the impossible. We are hungry for surprises, astonishment. In short, we are looking for a true story, but one impossible to explain in all its complexity. When we discover that story, we shall have found- magic. ~ Edward Claflin

I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish. ~ David Crabb

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story. ~ Carol Bly

At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon. ~ Michael Chabon

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life. ~ Lauren Groff

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric - strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her - a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth. ~ Henry James

I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers. ~ Laurel Nakadate

The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York ... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio ... and we put down some demos ... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent ... He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record. ~ Lesley Gore

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. ~ Anne Lamott

Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term. ~ Doris Lessing

His lips turned upward. Man told you to lick salt off me, but he didn't say where you would be licking the salt from. ~ Elizabeth Morgan

But if your story is about the inner workings of competitive quilting, you'd better make it short and extra witty. People drift off when you stop talking about stuff that isn't, well, them. The ~ Scott Adams

I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day. ~ Mark Mothersbaugh

As he carefully made his way back to the stairs and awkwardly turned off the light, he did not notice that the dark shadow he had assumed was his reflection remained in the mirror. He didn't see the hands press against the surface and make large, liquid-like bulges beneath the glass. Nor did he hear the whispers that so suddenly and violently filled the dark, cluttered space as he had closed and locked the heavy attic door. ~ "The Mirror ~ Cassie McCown

That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this. ~ Dan Chaon

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage. ~ Erica Jong

In Hollywood if you're good looking, tall, have okay teeth and nice skin, the odds of being successful are great. If you're short and fat, it's a different story. But as long as you look like a leading man type, half your job is done already. ~ John Corbett

Ryan had read half his book, listened to all his music, eaten two packets of biscuits and an apple, played seventy-two games of Donkey Kong, completing all the levels, and counted every Italian sports car they'd passed in the last hundred miles. Twenty-four hours of groggy sticky travel, twenty-four hours stuck in this overheated tin can on wheels, and he finally knew what it was like to be utterly and unendingly bored. He propped an elbow on the car window frame and stuck his arm out of the opening. Combing his hand through the slipstream, he let the cool air tickle his fingers as he watched the countryside stream past. ~ Peter Bunzl

She had been waiting for someone to notice her, like, really notice her. She felt that that was the key, that she would go from the duck to the swan the minute someone recognized her potential. And they would look into her like they were trying to pierce her eyes with theirs, like they were trying to make her heart stop, and the whole world would become background noise and she would take her first breath after all of these years of nothing but existing. It would be like a coronation, or a star exploding, and then she would be born. She would be alive, and she would be loved. ~ Rose Fall

Okay, they were ogre children with little gray teeth,
but they were kids! They didn't do anything, not really.
Sure, when they played, they boiled their dolls then cut
them into bite-sized pieces. But that was make-believe.

Everybody says the moral of the story
is that short guys can be cunning
and brave.

But I think the moral is that children pay
for the sins of their parent. Ask anybody
who hates to go home after school.

Ask the girl whose mother is a drunk
and a whore. Ask the boy whose dad
is doing twenty-five to life. ~ Ron Koertge

Most of the girls I've met since moving here have failed to ignite any modicum of enduring interest. Of course, I've dated; I'm seventeen years old and as horny as the next guy. ~ Siobhan Davis

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. ~ Franz Kafka

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. ~ Richard Russo

He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter. He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
(From the story "Powers") ~ Alice Munro

Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement ~ Bret Harte

The truth is I'm a chicken shit coward who's afraid of a girl like you. When I'm with you, I want things I never thought I'd be able to have, or deserved, and that scares me a little. I'm just a regular guy who works in a bar and you're this beautiful person who shines brighter than the stars.
I think I just made up some cheesy poetry so I'll stop while I'm ahead.
If you feel like talking, give me a call.
~D
Sophie sat down on the floor and, through blurry eyes, reread the note so many times she had it memorized.
She was going to do more than give him a call. ~ Jenny Lyn

I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley's wonderful phrase - I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin's Letters - that the "doors of the Russian house are wide open": we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them. ~ V.S. Pritchett

A boy adopts a hero for two reasons: because a hero captivates his soul and serves as a projection of his innermost self; and, because a hero seems to have solved many problems that may worry a boy, or at least demonstrates the capacity to solve them. The hero is an idealization of successful living, even though he may die in a story. The death may be gallant, brave, tragic, or perhaps even foolhardy. But living or dead, a hero is the stylistic embodiment of living on one's own terms – noble terms, grand terms, exciting terms – terms, in short, that complement any youth's uncorrupted, untamed, unabridged projection of what is possible to him in life ~ Edward Cline