#tories

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably. ↗

— John Cheever

#prose #short-stories #intelligence

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

#writing #short-story

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

#short-fiction #short-stories #short-story #short-story

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#childhood #literature #reading #stories #words

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death #end #enough #far #keep

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#actions #acts #creation #dream #dreams

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#writing #escape

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#stories #fairies

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother. ↗

— John Connolly

#fantasy #stories #fairies

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#africa #pilot #stories #women #doubt