Quotes by Short Story Writers - Page 2

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him and when he is compelled to exist as it were by his own inner light.
Frank O'Connor
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W Somerset Maugham
When fate's got it in for you there's no limit to what you may have to put up with.
Georgette Heyer
The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Joseph Conrad
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W Somerset Maugham
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved.
W Somerset Maugham
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
Stephen Vincent Benét
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
Joseph Conrad
Happiness ... is achieved only by making others happy.
Stuart Cloete
The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love.
W Somerset Maugham
Happiness happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
Joseph Conrad
Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
William Maxwell
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W Somerset Maugham
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.
Joseph Conrad
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Joseph Conrad
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?
Joseph Conrad
To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.
W Somerset Maugham
Dinner a time when . . . one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely.
W Somerset Maugham
How does one kill fear I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart slash off its spectral head take it by the spectral throat?
Joseph Conrad
There is only one thing about which I am certain and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
W Somerset Maugham
In a way winter is the real spring the time when the inner things happen the resurge of nature.
Edna O'Brien
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
Have the courage of your desire.
George R. Gissing
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves or on whom she simply depends is want of courage.
Joseph Conrad
Facing it-always facing it-that's the way to get through. Face it!
Joseph Conrad
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
People will buy anything that's one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Joseph Conrad
As for what you're calling hard luck - well we made New England out of it. That and codfish.
Stephen Vincent Benét
America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.
James T. Farrell
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Joseph Conrad
The mind which renounces once and forever a futile hope has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
George R. Gissing
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
Agnes Turnbull
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W Somerset Maugham
If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
Edna O'Brien
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Russell Banks
I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W Somerset Maugham
That's what you think of me, is it, girl?" said his lordship, a glint in his
Georgette Heyer
M'sieur, I am as a slave to my wife." He kissed the tips of his fingers. "I am as the dirt beneath her feet." He clasped his hands. "I must bestow on her all that she desires, or die!""Pray make use of my sword, " invited his Grace. "It is in the corner behind you.
Georgette Heyer
She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
W Somerset Maugham
I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.
W Somerset Maugham
Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.
Guy de Maupassant
It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.
Joseph Epstein
At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.
William Maxwell
Innocence is defined in dictionaries as freedom from guilt or sin, especially from lack of knowledge; purity of heart; blamelessness; guilelessness; simplicity, etc.
William Maxwell
When you're sorting yourself out, family are not often the ones you can turn to. They represent the place of departure and not the place of arrival.
Witi Ihimaera
For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.
Jean Rhys
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
W Somerset Maugham
The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast.
Joseph Conrad
The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.
James K. Morrow
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.
Kenzaburō Ōe