Quotes by Short Story Writers

Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?

W Somerset Maugham

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm

Guy de Maupassant

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]

Guy de Maupassant

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

W Somerset Maugham