#stories

She was so plain. Would it kill you to wear skirts more, he had said to her. Would it really hurt you? He was thinking of how he would like to see her when she was alone with him. He knew she could dress when she had to, but this was what he was saying. He was saying something about their private life. He was saying something about his needs as a man. He imagines America’s anger at this. It would be the women, mainly. Their eager faces had watched: Amelia boarding the plane for her first transatlantic flight; Amelia waving to the crowd in the ticker tape parade; Amelia leaving luncheons and concert halls. Some had been housewives and some, girls with dreams of loops and spins and dives, of hugging the curvature of the earth through a thin sheet of aluminum. -- After Amelia ↗

— Meg Sefton

#fictional-character #short-stories #anger

That night I slept like a baby. When I woke the next morning I knew I was going to smoke heroin again. Everything that day was enjoyable: sitting on the bus, working all day – it all felt good. It was the best day of my life. ↗

— Christine Lewry

#memoir #true-stories #true-stories-drugs #life

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is. ↗

— Jincy Willett

#stories #life

My standards were, after all, abnormally high." - the fictional ghost of Hugh Hefner, lamenting on sex in the after-life. ↗

— Michael Czyzniejewski

#curbside-splendor #hugh-hefner #life

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#stories #writing #imagination

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#end #fiction #life #reading #stories

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#perspective #stories #love

True love stories never have endings. ↗

— Richard Bach

#love #love stories #never #stories #true

I have stories. But stories are not facts.' 'I like stories. Love them, actually. Most of the time they're better than facts. ↗

— Morgan Rhodes

#stories #love

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end. Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation. ↗

— Erica Lorraine Scheidt

#stories #storytelling #love