Top 68 Fiction Short Story Quotes
#1. She got injun fire in her blood, as I hear tell it, and it seem to me Lucy about ripe to snap a crack in that jumping bean she call a head.
Ojo Blacke
#2. Perhaps he found it strange being accompanied by a Chinese-Nigerian arms trafficking pirate, but the Irish priest had just followed me silently on board the covert government transport.
Dayo Ntwari
#3. A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience ... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
John L'Heureux
#4. I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.
Amish Tripathi
#5. 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
#6. As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
#7. An intense longing builds inside me, and I fight the urge to propel myself forward and grab her into my arms.
Siobhan Davis
#8. Ariana strikes me as the type of girl who is attracted to authenticity.
Siobhan Davis
#9. I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders
#10. I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.
You Jin
#11. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.
Donald Barthelme
#12. The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.
Nicholas Royle
#13. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ...
Lawrence Block
#14. Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it
love yourself
Kurt Vonnegut
#15. I am unbelievably nervous.
It is most unlike me.
This girl is really messing with my mojo.
Siobhan Davis
#16. At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Laurence Yep
#17. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz
William L.K.
#18. While I AM sure of what I want, I'm equally unsure of how to attain it.
Siobhan Davis
#19. Between the sands of time and tradition is a multitude of truths untold.
J.E. Cross
#20. And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story)
Isaac Asimov
#21. There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
Peter Thiel
#22. Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.
Kurt Vonnegut
#24. He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was
if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.
Kurt Vonnegut
#25. 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
#26. When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
Ann Patchett
#28. [Anger] gave him the soul to keep fighting no matter how many times the world seemed bent on destroying him. He may be a broken young man, but he would never be a defeated one
Hannah Heath
#29. My mind skidded round a very short track and passed the finish line in a matter of seconds without any sensible conclusion.
Petra Kidd
#31. 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
#32. While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)
S.J. Rozan
#33. I engage in subtle stalking. That's entirely different and perfectly socially acceptable.
Siobhan Davis
#34. I fell in love with her suddenly, deeply, in the most all-consuming way.
Siobhan Davis
#35. I feel myself collapse inside as if the life force has been sucked out of me.
Siobhan Davis
#36. But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.
JY Yang
#37. 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
#38. I'm following hot on her heels, smarting from her latest rebuttal, and I can't contain my temper as the flood of rejection washes over me, tossing me precariously close to the edge.
Siobhan Davis
#39. Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?
Helen McCloy
#40. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#41. 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
#42. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#43. I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
Ramez Naam
#44. I'm not just the sum of how I look although that seems to be a popular opinion, and it infuriates me.
Siobhan Davis
#45. Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try"...As said by Ernest Hemingway in "Blast"...The first short story in "Bullet".
Christopher J. Pumphrey
#46. The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold.
Stephen Harker
#47. One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.
Ng Yi-Sheng
#48. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#50. Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.
Justin Ker
#51. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#52. What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
Henry James
#53. Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.
Evan Adam Ang
#54. Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven.
R. Barri Flowers
#55. Why read fiction when real life can be just as interesting?
LHandLG
#56. 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
#57. My whore of a brother has done it again." "Then, as always, orders me to clean up the mess." "I think I hate him." Poseidon to his brother, Zeus.
Yelle Hughes
#58. When the emergency brappers went of they did what any dedicated, well-trained and quick-minded Service personnel would do; they paniced.
From the short story What Makes Us Human.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#59. The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a "soundless music". It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.
You Jin
#60. I told you. I've been watching." She twirled, her arms outstretched. "Watching, watching, watching.
A.F. Stewart
#61. It's the first instance where I believe that it might actually be wrong, the first time I feel like a bit of a creep.
Siobhan Davis
#62. I need to master the art of talking to her before I can even contemplate anything else.
Siobhan Davis
#63. I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
Louise Brown
#64. Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.
O Thiam Chin
#65. There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.
Chew Chia Shao Wei
#66. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#67. The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
Louise Bogan
#68. Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
Henry James
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