57 Short Story Quotes

In the vast world of literature, short stories hold a special place, capturing poignant moments and profound truths within a limited number of pages. Each sentence can convey deep emotion, create vivid imagery, and leave lasting impressions. With this in mind, we've curated a collection of the top 57 short story quotes that exemplify the art of concise storytelling. Whether you're a seasoned reader or new to the genre, these quotes will inspire, provoke thought, and showcase the timeless beauty of short storytelling. Dive in and let each quote remind you of the power of words and the magic they can weave.

1. “Of course you know him. Everyone knows a pear-shaped man.” - George R.R. Martin

2. “You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!” - Flannery O'Connor

3. “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz” - William L.K.

4. “From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the "River of Silence"; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever.” - Edgar Allan Poe

5. “I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.” - Julie Orringer

6. “I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.” - Julie Orringer

7. “- I don’t know what else to say.- There is nothing else to say. A few minutes of words can’t change years of absurdity.” - Cameron Trost

8. “Dua kebaikan yang berbeda tidak mungkin berada pada satu intensitas yang sama. Sesederhana itu.” - Fredrik Nael

9. “Gerisik angan dan deru lembut laju harapan.Waktu itu adalah menit-menit akhir menjelang malam di Bukit Angin. Daun-daun berwarna-warni dalam berbagai wujud melayang ke langit dan berkumpul mengelilingi puncak pusaran angin. Di sana, di balik awan, beradalah studio Sang Pelukis.” - Fredrik Nael

10. “Segala hal yang dikatakan Komandan mengenai Orde adalah kebenaran yang tidak dilebih-lebihkan. Orde memang bersinonim dengan kebaikan. Orde menghargai kemajuan. Orde mencintai kehidupan. Orde bahkan mengajarkan pertobatan. Semua yang dijabarkan di dalam Kitab pada dasarnya akan berakhir pada kebahagiaan, pun setelah kematian.Akan tetapi Orde dan Kitab adalah takdir. Yang tidak dapat dibantah dan harus diterima semua orang dengan pasrah.Sama seperti penglihatanku, Orde tidak memberikan pilihan.” - Fredrik Nael

11. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

12. “It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.” - Robin Black

13. “What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?...” - Katherine Mansfield

14. “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

15. “I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.” - Donald Barthelme

16. “He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.” - Jess C. Scott

17. “She was the curator of her marriage, collector of swift quotes and unremarked-upon sensations.” - Laura Furman

18. “Beauty without the beloved is a like a sword through the heart.” - Ida Alexa Ross Wylie

19. “The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah’s life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being.--from short story ELIJAH’S SKIN” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

20. “That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget.” - Christian Crews

21. “I’m mistaken….for thinking you were someone with a heart worth breaking.” - Jamie Weise

22. “The Scottish sun, shocked by having its usual cloudy underpinnings stripped away, shone feverishly, embarrassed by its nakedness.” - Stuart Haddon

23. “He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland.” - Anton Chekhov

24. “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

25. “We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years” - Dan Chaon

26. “She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.” - Dan Chaon

27. “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

28. “she should have told me that times slides away on a hillside of lose shale and takes everything in its path-dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.” - Kristin Hannah

29. “Apalah gunanya impian bila tidak diwujudkan?” - Fredrik Nael

30. “He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.” - Amy Hempel

31. “He admired bears because everyone was afraid to disturb them while they slept and fish were so in love with bears that they jumper right into their mouths. He ate meat and never felt bad about it unless he saw how the animal was slaughtered or if the meat was not cooked properly but he thought thrice about killing bus.” - Robb Todd

32. “The pupil of a goat's eye is elongate like a cat's, but if you look closely you'll see that it's in the horizontal position, and if you look closer still you'll see that it's less gracefully shaped, more of a ragged slot, dirty yellow. And you'll see that the white of a goat's eye is all black.” - Eugene Marten

33. “I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?” - Chayada Welljaipet

34. “I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.” - Chayada Welljaipet

35. “Thank you father, thank you. I know you watched me from above and protected me. I promise I shall serve the Magnarian Confederation with all my body and soul. I shall dedicate myself fully to our confederation, the family that you so loved. And I love it too. I shall protect, love and respect it always. This is my promise and commitment. Thank you” - Chayada Welljaipet

36. “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

37. “Absently, Quinn reached for the sheet to replace it over the aged mirror, but the back of his hand brushed against the cold surface and a strange shiver ran up his arm and down his spine. ~ "The Mirror” - Cassie McCown

38. “There, in the corner under the window—the window through which he thought he saw movement before—was a slender white foot! Quinn’s heart froze in his chest and frightened bile began working its way up his esophagus. ~ "The Mirror” - Cassie McCown

39. “First contact comes not by hand of man, but by metal of machine.” - Ryan Sean O'Reilly

40. “They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.” - Haruki Murakami

41. “I learned there were lots of realities in the world.” - Haruki Murakami

42. “My great-great grandfather and I were best of friends, although we never met.Fire and shipwreck orphan us – 140 years apart. We escape to imagination to survive our fate. There, midst flights of whimsy we find one another. Companionship quells our loneliness. We create fables and tales, shields against a harsh existence. We must battle animals and humans of prey.Together, he, the future abolitionist-publisher James Thaddeus ‘Blackjack’ Fiction, and I vault from glory-laden adventures to tragedy and then to triumph. I am Raji Singh and this is my story.” - Raji Singh

43. “A good story is like a well-placed punch: quick, effective, and impossible to ignore.” - R L Raymond

44. “It is better to take the other road, even if it's longer. Get a car, maybe" Green Eyes” - A.G. Billig

45. “The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.” - Marcus Speh

46. “I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.” - Edgar Allan Poe

47. “I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.” - Edgar Allan Poe

48. “I won’t have you calling me Miss Tuttle. That’s what the doc calls me. And the lady at the bank. One takes my temperature and the other my money. Friends don’t take anything—they give.” - Diane Lynn McGyver

49. “You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.” - Péter Zilahy

50. “Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned.” - Brad Watson

51. “As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.” - Natalie Goldberg

52. “He plunged into the foliage, and was swept into a humid, wet world of towering trees, animal chirps and thick ferns. After a few steps, he turned, and could barely make out the village. He walked a few more steps. He could see nothing now except for the thick trees and long ferns and grasses that surrounded him. He was enveloped into the confined space between trees, surrounded by the jungle heat and staccato chirps. He turned in the direction of the village, but could only see thick, dense trees. Hoping his sense of direction had not been muddled, he turned back around to the direction of the alleged ocean, and kept walking.Now the calls he heard sounded more and more strange. How far had he walked by now? The jungle, or rain forest, whatever it was, did not relent, and he kept on weaving into narrow gaps between the sturdy ferns and towering trees, pressing onwards. This continued for a seemingly oppressive amount of time, and he began to doubt his decision. To come to this place. To take a chance with his life, which was going in the right direction. Why couldn’t he be happy with the normal and mundane, he cursed, scolding his own stubbornness” - T.P. Grish

53. “His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment’s living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. ‘Hey Dom, how you doin’?’ a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn’t studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said” - T.P. Grish

54. “Inside a wool jacket the man had made a pocket for the treasure and from time to time he would jiggle the pocket, just to make sure that it was still there. And when on the train he rode to work he would jiggle it there also, but he would disguise his jiggling of the treasure on the train by devising a distraction. For example, the man would pretend to be profoundly interested in something outside the train, such as the little girl who seemed to be jumping high up on a trampoline, just high enough so that she could spy the man on the train, and in this way he really did become quite interested in what occurred outside the train, although he would still jiggle the treasure, if only out of habit. Also on the train he'd do a crossword puzzle and check his watch by rolling up his sleeve; when he did so he almost fell asleep. Antoine often felt his life to be more tedious with this treasure, because in order not to be overly noticed he had deemed it wise to fall into as much a routine as possible and do everything as casually as possible, and so, as a consequence, despite the fact that he hated his wife and daughter, he didn't leave them, he came home to them every night and he ate the creamed chicken that his wife would prepare for him, he would accept the large, fleshy hand that would push him around while he sat around in his house in an attempt to read or watch the weather, he took out the trash, he got up on time every morning and took a quick, cold shower, he shaved, he accepted the cold eggs and orange juice and coffee, he picked the newspaper off the patio and took it inside with him to read her the top headlines, and of course he went to the job.” - Justin Dobbs

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

56. “Sebuah cerpen yang tidak bagus, tetapi siap adalah lebih baik daripada sebuah cerpen yang kononnya bagus, tetapi tidak siap-siap.” - Nisah Haji Haron

57. “The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.” - Marjorie Hudson