Short Single Quotes

#1. My mother was a woman. A black woman. A single mother. Raising two kids on her own. So she was dark skinned. Had short hair. Got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers. So that's why she was a Black Panther.

Tupac Shakur

#2. One question keeps troubling me: Why? ... The short answer: I don't know. and yet that single word, why, remains the consummate human query. By nature, we're curious. We want to know.

Don Piper

#3. I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.

Antonya Nelson

#4. I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don't forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and feminine.

K. Kanagalatha

#5. E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

Gabrielle Zevin

#6. I've been more single than not in my short life.

Michael Kiwanuka

#7. A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.

John L'Heureux

#8. Have you ever been in jail, mate? Whatever you did in your life, nothing can be compared to a single day in jail.

Stefania Mattana

#9. As for the single market, the E.U.'s landmark achievement, there is no question that a euro zone breakup would severely disrupt its operation in the short run.

Barry Eichengreen

#10. Life is a strong drink served up in an extremely short, and fragile shot glass. We shouldn't waste a single drop.

Samantha Sotto

#11. The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.

Daniel H. Pink

#12. White angel wings, made up from thousands of short feathers, now surrounded him.

"Uh. Bird?" She pointed dumbly, unable to form a single coherent though more.
"Harpie." He gave her a glare that could have killed.

Constance Sharper

#13. Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

Etty Hillesum

#14. Stop thinking of the past, and stop worrying about the future. Just win the day. Achieve the goals you set for every single day, and you'll rebuild your life in a few short years.

Kevin J. Donaldson

#15. How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crown'd from some single herb or tree. Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow'rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose.

Andrew Marvell

#16. monopsony: a single buyer, who may harm suppliers in the short term but also consumers in the long term, as they suffer from diminished choice and reduced competition.

Anonymous

#17. The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius. I

Alan Bradley

#18. You can't change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can't change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.

Norman Mailer

#19. Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you.

Sarah Dessen

#20. A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Edgar Allan Poe

#21. Yes, she probably thought he was a few displays short of an exhibition, seeing as he had yet to utter a single word.

Liz Bower

#22. Life is short. Don't waste a single moment.

Tess Alley

#23. Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

Karina Longworth

#24. Almost every single commercial on television for shampoo, sports shoes, drinks, food, clothes, perfume, cars, etc., is a short fairy tale, for they are given magical qualities.

Jack Zipes

#25. Where have you ever found that man who stopped short after the perpetration of a single crime?

Juvenal

#26. I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I've known you for a short time, but I feel like I've known you forever.

J.A. Redmerski

#27. One should not utter a word about his own inadequacies. In the Oxo it says: 'When a man lets out a single word, the long and short of him will be known.'

Takeda Nobushige

#28. The knight is renowned for, among other things, its suitability as a blockader ... Because its strength lies in short-range operations it is not uncomfortable standing in a single spot for long periods, as the Bishop is.

Samuel Reshevsky

#29. The fat kids, the skinny kids, the tall ones, the short ones, and everybody in between: I am so thankful that not a single one of us is the exact same. What a boring world that would be.

Julie Murphy

#30. If you distill the essence of everything, what life is about, every single one of us is given a short moment in time on this planet, and we all have one universal need and desire, and that is to be loved and to love.

Gavin Newsom

#31. Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

Pat Conroy

#32. Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?

Dean Kamen

#33. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#34. We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

Anna Akhmatova

#35. Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it.

Alexander Pushkin

#36. Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

William Shakespeare

#37. While my favorite book of short stories is Fredrick Brown's 'Nightmares and Geezenstacks,' my favorite single story is 'Sound of Thunder,' by Ray Bradbury.

James Luceno

#38. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

Sherwood Anderson

#39. I think the biggest single thing that causes difficulty in the business world is the short-term view. We become obsessed with it. But it forces bad decisions.

James Sinegal

#40. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

Henry Watson Fowler

#41. Living appears good, long, and tiresome, but it is way too short than a single stroke of lightning.

Aniruddha Sastikar

#42. Oman's book Wellington's Army is 400 pages in length but just a single page is devoted to the artillery with the opening, 'only a short note is required as to Wellington's use of artillery'. Historians ever since

Nick Lipscombe

#43. A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

Richard K. Morgan

#44. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

Louis Menand

#45. She was mined for the children
in her, one daughter, then another,
a short seam, quick to clay,
and not a single son to save them.

Robert Wrigley

#46. The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.

Samuel Johnson

#47. Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

Maria Montessori

#48. Technology also addresses the necessity to cover a wide range of content in a short length of time by minimizing the need to take each step of the curriculum at a slow enough pace to teach the slowest learners in a single, teacher-directed way.

Peggy Grant

#49. An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

E.F. Schumacher

#50. A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ...

Edgar Allan Poe

#51. Home. That wonderful place I was lucky enough to revisit no matter how short a time finally realizing it's not relegated to just one single place its wherever you make it.

Alyson Noel

#52. More broadly, strategic alliances are more difficult to manage and coordinate than single ventures; the potential for misunderstanding and disagreement, particularly between partners from different cultures, is great. Certainly many such alliances are short lived.

Peter Dicken

#53. Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.

John Dewey

#54. In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.

Donald Maass

#55. Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life.

Hamilton Wright Mabie

#56. When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.

Keith Carter

#57. Some worked in collaboration with each other to produce comics as well as short stories.I was partnered with Anita Roy. We critiqued each other's stories. Hers is a corker: future Masterchef. I chortled. There's not a single dud in Eat the Sky.

Justine Larbalestier

#58. Life is too short to hold in a single tear, a single laugh, a single breath. Biology is how we exist. Emotions are how we live.

Jewel E. Ann

#59. Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science ... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time

Jacques Ellul

#60. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the weight of a single grain of sand? The answer is equal to my interest in the message you are about to leave so make it short.
Mitch Hertzog's voice mail message.

Meg Cabot