Short Story Corrie Quotes

Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing - what they had just done - appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with. ~ Alice Munro

The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad. ~ Michael Chabon

I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel. ~ Geraldine McCaughrean

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.
For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.
And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass. ~ Richard Flanagan

As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

A prickle of awareness made the hairs at the back of his neck stand. A deep chill sank into his flesh to settle around his heart, squeezing it. Skeletal fingers scraped along his spine and he wanted to look back over his shoulder, but couldn't. No, he didn't dare. If he saw what caused the sound it might be more than he could handle. Rooted to the ground, he couldn't twitch a finger or twist his head around. His lips glued together, so he couldn't speak. ~ Pamela K. Kinney

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you. ~ A. Merc Rustad

All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities, the note concludes.
This is surely true. Yet the vivacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my experience. ~ Donald Barthelme

Night had fallen, and Diane admired the deep sky behind Steve's calm countenance. They looked into each other's eyes again and felt the spark and excitement of discovery. As if to celebrate the perfect, life-enabling distance of the earth from the sun, Diane and Steve kissed again."
"-The Grand Unified Story (a Short Story) from Stories and Scripts: an Anthology ~ Zack Love

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing. ~ Irwin Shaw

After I published my first book, my sister, known as Kali Willows, began writing. She fell as in love with it as I did. She has a number of short stories. ~ Franny Armstrong

My short love story gave me lots of memories but i never wanted memories, I wanted you. ~ Raaz Ojha

In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. There is that moment, but to hold it off is a lovely and worthwhile goal. ~ Aimee Bender

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up - up, up. And ... down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock. ~ Susan Sontag

Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they'd had enough, I'd tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I'd worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, "story ideas." Later on, after I'd transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story. ~ Oscar Zeta Acosta

As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial. ~ Anton Chekhov

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle's tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube.
"Fib!" Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest. ~ Ruth McLeod-Kearns

I have this uncanny knack of falling for the most irrelevant men,my love story would be comprising of short stories. ~ Pushpa Rana

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting. ~ Terry Pratchett

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things." short story "Sister Imelda ~ Edna O'Brien

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story. ~ Pete Hamill

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

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel. ~ Anne McCaffrey

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed
he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog. ~ Graham Greene

Oh no, princess. I would never carry out anything which could harm your being. This was just something I was told to say. I'm not sure what is planned, if, you go against their wishes. But, I'm sure you're smart and won't test them. ~ Chayada Welljaipet

What if I were to tell you the game's been rigged, that I was destined to win from the very beginning? To be clear: Winning is subjective. For the record: I win by losing, by avoiding the confusion of possibility, the sheer terror of potential. To make a long story short: I win when I lose and I lose by running, by pushing you away. ~ Kris Kidd

The light over the whole hill was pure, pale, of an exaggerated clarity, as if all the good days of his youth had been distilled down into this one day, and the whole coltish ascendant time when he was 18, 19, 20, had been handed back to him briefly, intact and precious. That was the time when there had been more hours in the day, and every hour precious enough so that it could be fooled away. By the time a man got into the high 30s, the hours became more frantic and less precious, more needed and more carefully hoarded and more fully used, but less loved and less enjoyed. -Beyond the Glass Mountain (short story) ~ Wallace Stegner

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life. ~ Raymond Carver

You are the only thing I've ever needed. The only treasure that matters.
- Seamus Tierney ~ Libby Bishop

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

In late 2001, I contributed a short story called 'Castaways' to an anthology called 'In Laymon's Terms,' which was a tribute to Richard Laymon, who had passed away earlier that year. ~ Brian Keene

To tell a short story is to know how to keep a secret. ~ Andres Neuman

He clasped his hands in front of his chest, stood for a moment in silence to think, and then spoke, "Since it is obvious that you want to know the truth, I'll show it to you in its completeness." But then he narrowed his eyes. "What I'm about to show you, what you're about to see, you'll have to keep to yourself. You will be the only human being who will know the truth of why I brought you and the others here. The truth sometimes can be painful. Well, for this reason, I ask once again: are you ready for such responsibility? ~ Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual proof my fiercely skeptical mind had always demanded. Not some logical, 37-step proof of God's existence. It was a personal proof. And it was irrefutable. ~ Zack Love