Top Short Stories Quotes

There was a brown substance inside and Chase had no doubt: it was heroin. Only a tiny amount, but very pure." - Cutting Right to the Chase Vol.2

Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

This isn't where I intended to be. Killing a person has a funny way of getting your life off-track.

This isn't where I intended to be. Killing a person has a funny way of getting your life off-track. (Dark City Lights)

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out...

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt...

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies, Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray.You weren't saying that last night, Jaxton retaliated, comi...

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't...

The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zo...

You have to believe me without proof. That's what faith is — believing without proof.' They got up from the bank of stones. It was getting late, the shadows lay cool and lengthened on the grass and th...

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)

I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts: ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the ti...