2 Short Stories Quotes Highlights

Short stories have an unparalleled ability to captivate with their brevity, weaving intricate narratives and profound emotions into just a few pages. Within their concise framework, authors distill powerful insights and memorable lines that linger in readers' minds long after the last word. In this exploration, we delve into a curated collection of standout quotes from two of the most impactful short stories, each capturing the essence of human experience and imagination. Whether you are a seasoned aficionado or new to the world of short fiction, these quotes promise to inspire reflection and offer a glimpse into the artistry of their authors.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” - Lorrie Moore

4. “Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.” - Neil Gaiman

5. “A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.” - Edgar Allan Poe

6. “I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.” - Christopher Hitchens

7. “Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.” - Karen Russell

8. “I’d always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo–people laboring in the vineyards of pseudo–intellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self–aggrandizement.” - Walt Shiel

9. “Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.” - Cate Kennedy

10. “I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.” - Cate Kennedy

11. “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” - Edgar Allan Poe

12. “Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

13. “Just tell yourself they're only stories. Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)” - Pamela K. Kinney

14. “My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...” - Haruki Murakami

15. “I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]” - Kim Edwards

16. “Do you mind?” she asked.“Mind what?”“While you were looking in the mirror I couldn’t help myself and I began fantasizing about you. And I figured if I was going to continue to fantasize about you, the only polite thing to do was to ask your permission. So now I’m doing the polite thing again and asking, ‘do you mind?’”“No, Nina. I don’t mind at all.”Then she leaned down and kissed him.” - Richard Finney

17. “But I want to assure you, if it’s your last day on earth, even after 2,000 years, I strongly suggest you go for the Versace leaf halter dress.” - Richard Finney

18. “She knew breaking up with Ethan was going to be a full-time job because being in a relationship with him had also been a full-time job.” - Richard Finney

19. “Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul” - Kay Boyle

20. “What we are about to have here is a holy water smack down!” - David Donaghe

21. “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.” - Eudora Welty

22. “For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” - John Cheever

23. “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.” - William H. Gass

24. “Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.” - Clark Zlotchew

25. “On the Writing Process:"When in doubt, take it out.,” - Barbara DaCosta

26. “I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

27. “When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.” - Clark Zlotchew

28. “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

29. “...writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.” - Ann Patchett

30. “Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.” - Isobelle Carmody

31. “If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better”.” - Alexandar Tomov

32. “One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God” - Jorge Luis Borges

33. “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

34. “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 from American Honey)” - Kellie Elmore

35. “I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.” - Ria Tumimomor

36. “He looked out the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kilometers away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.” - Nam Le

37. “You know, the world is all about balance. You lose something here... maybe somebody else picks it up over there.” - Natasha Larry

38. “Oh, yeah. He's dead, a voice inside her head confirmed. "No way!" Brianna backed away from him, looking around the room in panic. Yeah, you're right. That lack of pulse probably means something else.” - Natasha Larry

39. “She sucked a breath and held it as something consumed her. Something else entirely.” - Natasha Larry

40. “A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.” - George Saunders

41. “What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.” - Karen Russell

42. “The old outcast gape the darkness and said: “The lonely man is a fire without fireplace…”.” - Alexandar Tomov

43. “…I wonder what actually this hospital is, why I am in it and who I am. I have no time to find out. I die, with my arms stretched towards the spotlights.Then whiteness.My body is still there somewhere…Buried in the extremely bright lights of empty hope.” - Alexandar Tomov

44. “…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