Quotes by Short Story Writers - Page 11

The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language.
Steve Almond
It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.
Steve Almond
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
Guy de Maupassant
To have luck and fail to act on it is tantamount to not having luck at all. In fact, it was worse. Barnes thought back to his self-help manuals. They all proclaimed with compelling force the necessity of recognizing opportunity then seizing it when it stuck.
Joseph G. Peterson
It was a dark story.
Joseph Conrad
He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and with seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.
W Somerset Maugham
He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and it seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.
W Somerset Maugham
All the best women are married, yes, they are - to all the worst men' There was an infinite slow caress in her tone but she went on rapidly 'So I shall never marry you. How should I marry a kind man, a good man? I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so crude. When your soft eyes look on me they look on a volcano.
A.E. Coppard
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it.
W Somerset Maugham
Has no one ever told you that it is the height of impropriety to kiss any gentleman, unless you have the intention of accompanying him immediately to the altar?
Georgette Heyer
You must not imagine that Papa or I have the least notion of compelling you to marry anyone whom you hold in aversion, for I am sure that such a thing would be quite shocking! And Charles would not do so either, would you, dear Charles?”(Elizabeth Ombersley)“No, certainly not. But neither would I consent to her marriage with any such frippery fellow as Augustus Fawnhope!”“Augustus,” announced Cecilia, putting up her chin, “will be remembered long after you have sunk into oblivion!”“By his creditors? I don’t doubt it.
Georgette Heyer
The Viscount stepped into the room. "Came to see if you was dead," he said. "Laid Pom odds you weren't."Lethbridge passed his hand across his eyes. "I'm not," he replied in a faint voice."No. I'm sorry," said the Viscount simply. He wandered over to the table and sat down. "Horry said she killed you, Pom said So she might, I said No. Nonsense."Lethbridge still holding a hand to his aching head tried to pull himself together. "Did you?" he said. His eyes ran over his self invited guest. "I see. Let me assure you once more that I am very much alive.""Well I wish you'd put your wig on," complained the Viscount. "What I want to know is why did Horry hit you on the head with a poker?"Lethbridge gingerly felt his bruised scalp. "With a poker was it? Pray ask her, though I doubt if she will tell you.""You shouldn't keep the front door open," said the Viscount. "What's to stop people coming in and hitting you over the head? It's preposterous.""I wish you'd go home," said Lethbridge wearily.The Viscount surveyed the supper-table with a knowing eye."Card-party?" he inquired.
Georgette Heyer
Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.
Joseph Conrad
The more enchanted the idyll, greater must be the pain of its ending.
Georgette Heyer
Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?
Sinclair Lewis
When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.
Guy de Maupassant
Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?
Joseph Conrad
Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...
Keri Hulme
Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs.
Guy de Maupassant
Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.
Guy de Maupassant
The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.
Keri Hulme
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
Joseph Conrad
Man might carve his mark on the earth but unless he's vigilant, Nature will take it all back.
Witi Ihimaera
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
Guy de Maupassant
Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.
Guy de Maupassant
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.
Joseph Conrad
Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
Joseph Conrad
Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.
Kenzaburō Ōe
I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad
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
Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
Guy de Maupassant
In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.
Sinclair Lewis
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthousiastic outbreak in a madhouse.
Joseph Conrad
We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness.
Guy de Maupassant
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
Joseph Epstein
The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.
Guy de Maupassant
Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace.
W Somerset Maugham
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Edna O'Brien
His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ...
W Somerset Maugham
I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'Why do you read then?'Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times. ...
W Somerset Maugham
Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It'll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you've made a hash of it.""I've got to paint," he repeated."Supposing you're never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn't matter if you're not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you're just adequate; but it's different with an artist.""You blasted fool," he said."I don't see why, unless it's folly to say the obvious.""I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown.
W Somerset Maugham
It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.
Guy de Maupassant
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W Somerset Maugham
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
Joseph Conrad
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
Steve Almond
Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
Joseph Conrad
I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
W Somerset Maugham
Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty Kosmos il perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature--the great artist.
Joseph Conrad
Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.
Guy de Maupassant
She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.
m. somerset maugham
I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safely. That was the last I ever saw of him. He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that sight...---The Lotus Eater
W Somerset Maugham
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
W Somerset Maugham
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
W Somerset Maugham
But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...
W Somerset Maugham
Have all beautiful things sad destinies?
Jean Rhys
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
W Somerset Maugham
Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.
Andrew Sean Greer
Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.
Frank O'Connor
I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.
Claire Keegan
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W Somerset Maugham