#stories

The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside. But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls. It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room. That’s when the stories can move in. They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#gingerbread #gingerbread-house #holiday #holidays #house

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#calcutta #chronicle-of-the-past #darkness #generations #ghosts

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ↗

— Harold Ross

#back #day #few #filled #his

My uncle who helped in a big part of raising me from when I was young, had moved from California, and would just tell me these legendary stories of these motorcycle clubs that he was around and that he used to ride with. ↗

— Theo Rossi

#big #california #clubs #had #helped

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability. ↗

— Murray Gell-Mann

#assigned #behaves #fundamental #gives #histories

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story. ↗

— David Morse

#community #film #important #independent #independent film

All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create. -from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010) ↗

— Michael Kennedy

#stories #dreams

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life. ↗

— Graham Swift

#life

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

#writing #short-story

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

#humor-relationships #short-stories #humor