Quotes by Short Story Writers

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad
And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.
Sinclair Lewis
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
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing
Guy de Maupassant
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
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
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
Joseph Conrad
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]
Guy de Maupassant
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W Somerset Maugham