"Short story" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the predominance of the magazine, among other causes, that are due the prevalence and perfection of the American short story. It has often been remarked that French literature alone is superior in this genre; and many of the best American productions of the kind can scarcely be called second even to the French in daintiness of phrase, sureness ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... a short story in the Waloo Gazette the next evening that would have interested Mary Rose very much if she had read it. It was one of the little incidents that have both a pathetic and a humorous appeal and it was very well ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... the Masters" page, consisting of assorted chunks looted from the literature of the past, when foreheads were bulged and thoughts profound, by Mr. Renshaw himself; one or two other special pages; a short story; answers to correspondents on domestic matters; and a "Moments of Mirth" page, conducted by one B. ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... this characteristic was brought over directly from the Milesian tale[84] or the Menippean satire.[85] To how many different kinds of stories the term "Milesian tale" was applied by the ancients is a matter of dispute, but the existence of the short story before the time of Petronius is beyond question. Indeed we find specimens of it. In its commonest form it presented a single episode of every-day life. It brought out some human weakness or foible. Very often it was a ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... often wandered among these flowers, and fed with her own hands in those marble basins the small shining fishes of which she was so fond,—the youth in order to delay the moment of separation proposed to recite a short story or rather rhapsody of which this adored Sultana was the heroine. It related, he said, to the reconcilement of a sort of lovers' quarrel which took place between her and the Emperor during a Feast of Roses at Cashmere; and would remind the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... commenting on this fact says: "Bravo the young Americans! Nothing in today's battle narrative from the front is more exhilarating than the account of their fight at Cantigny. It was clean cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen's short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism. Cantigny will one day be repeated a ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... finished a short story called Gentleman Jim, which I am going to send to Scribner's; very likely it will get overlooked and lost. I received, not long ago, a letter from Mr. Cady [2] about Greylock, which he had just read. It was a gratification to both my husband and myself, as the most discriminating ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the modern reader in a form and within limits which might be acceptable. It would be, no doubt, a condensed version of the original Epic, but the condensation would be effected, not by the translator telling a short story in his own language, but by linking together those passages of the original which describe the main and striking incidents, and thus telling the main story as told in the original work. The advantage of this arrangement is that, in the passages presented to ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... pleasant to read the short story written by Paul Laurence Dunbar some years ago, entitled "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope." This story possibly gives one of the most vivid pictures of real, genuine service rendered by a man of splendid parts in a needy section of the South, bearing out the practical ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... after the Civil War, was the appearance in Scribner's Magazine of a series of short stories, written by an unknown and hitherto untried hand, and afterward collected and republished in 'Old Creole Days.' This was long before the vogue of the short story, and that the publication of these tales was regarded as a literary event in those days is sufficient testimony to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Wolf," grim as if they had dropped out of the mediaeval mind; "The Necklace," with its applied pessimism; the tremendous fire and strength of "A Coward"; the miracle of splendor in "Moonlight"; the absolute perfection of a short story in "Happiness"—how various the view, how daring the touch! What freshness, what invention, and what wit! They are beautiful and heart-breaking little masterpieces, and "The Odd Number" makes one feel ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... human life comprehensively, not with the onesidedness of self-styled Realism. I would advise my young literary friends to emblazon on their banner "Shakespeare and the Bible." Real Realism is what English literature needs. The one undoubted development in recent English literature is the short story. But this is less due to any advance in artistic aspiration than to the fact that there is a good serial market for short stories, and the turnover is quicker for the trader than if he turned out long novels. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... told me the story I had a feeling that the murder was committed by either a Sicilian labourer on the links or a negro waiter at the club. Well, to make a short story shorter, I decided to test the blood-stain. Probably you didn't know it, but the Carnegie Institution has just published a minute, careful, and dry study of the blood of ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... many opportunities for helping the escape of fugitives, who, in return for the assistance they received, made me the depositary of their sufferings and wrongs. Of their relations I have made free use. To Mrs. Child, of New York, I am indebted for part of a short story. American Abolitionist journals are another source from whence some of the characters appearing in my narrative are taken. All these combined have made up my story. Having thus acknowledged my resources, I invite the attention of my readers to the following statement, from which ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... matter of opinion that she joins issue with them. They seem (the misguided ones) to have rashly said that "The Judgment of Eve" was "a novel boiled down," and that "The Wrackham Memoirs," on the other hand, was "a short story spun out." But Miss Sinclair is very sure that she knew what she was about. She can "lay her hand on her heart and swear that 'The Judgment of Eve' would have lost by any words that could conceivably have been added to it;" she is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... woman this way," said the priest. He led them to a house which he entered without knocking, and asked them to enter. They took the dead woman into a room occupied by two old ladies, and set down their load as Pere Marquee hurriedly told the short story ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... she wondered. Suppose real achievement and real success lay ahead? Suppose she was one of the women to whom California would some day point with pride? Deep in her singing heart she suspected that it was true. How it was to come about she could only guess. By her pen, of course. By some short story suddenly inspired, or by one of her flashing articles on the women's problems of the day. She was not a Shakespeare, not a George Eliot, but she had something for which the world ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... there's no reason that you should fail to make a living with your pen. Now let me advise you; put aside all your strict ideas about what is worthy and what is unworthy, and just act upon my advice. It's impossible for you to write a three-volume novel; very well, then do a short story of a kind that's likely to be popular. You know Mr Milvain is always saying that the long novel has had its day, and that in future people will write ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and a pencil is given to each player, who must then write a number of adjectives upon it. The slips are collected and given to the principal player, who has undertaken to read out a short story, substituting the adjectives on the slips for those already in the story. The adjectives must be taken as they come and not picked out to suit the story. The result is sometimes very laughable; as for instance—"The pretty rhinoceros is a very amiable animal. It is very attractive ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... started writing in 1930 when his first short story, When the Atoms Failed, was accepted by a science-fiction magazine. At that time he was twenty years old and still a student at college. As the title of the story indicates, he was even at that time occupied with the significance of atomic ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... exactly of his own size to meddle with, who should only have the odds of truth and honesty; which as I take it, would be an effectual way to silence him for ever. Upon this occasion, I cannot forbear a short story of a fanatic farmer who lived in my neighbourhood, and was so great a disputant in religion, that the servants in all the families thereabouts, reported, how he had confuted the bishop and all his clergy. I had then a footman who was fond of reading the Bible, and I borrowed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... mother, is as good as another to listen to good advice. Besides, I am only talking of one of my friends. 'Tis but a short story, Fabien, and instructive. I will give it you in very few words. My friend was very young and enthusiastic. He was on his way through the galleries of Italy, brush in hand, his heart full of the ceaseless song of youth in holiday. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... chapter of our short story I will venture to run rapidly over a few months so as to explain how the affairs of Bowick arranged themselves up to the end of the current year. I cannot pretend that the reader shall know, as he ought to be made to know, ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... after his death, we see how great a man Poe was. Poe invented the modern art of short story writing. His tales were translated into French by a famous writer named Charles Baudelaire. Other French writers saw how fine they were and modeled their work upon them. They learned the art of short story ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... just passed his thirtieth year—Charles Neville Buck, the author of "The Lighted Match," has travelled far and done much. Although it was as late as January, 1909, that he first settled down to write for the magazines, he has made already an established reputation as a short story writer, and promises to make an even greater name as a novelist. His first novel, "The Key to Yesterday," was one of the successes of the last publishing season, and we shall be greatly surprised if "The Lighted Match" does ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... looked searchingly, almost suspiciously, at Lomaque, as he put the question. "All?" he repeated. "Yours is a short story, indeed, my good friend! Perhaps you have forgotten ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... selling it on his own account, to the people of the coast; but the supply proving larger than the demand, and having no customers on board the frigate but Lieutenant Selvagee, he was now carrying home more than a third of his original stock. To make a short story of it, this functionary, being called upon in secret, was readily prevailed upon to part with a dozen bottles, with whose contents the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... gave him the full benefit of the declaration. To have explained this would have taken more time than he could spare; besides, it was "a great moral question," whose importance Mr. Spicer and his companion would not be likely to apprehend; so he made a short story of it, and resumed his walk, thankful that he had got rid ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... instant neither of us spoke; then, just as I opened my mouth, Phil began. He made a very short story of it,—how, through Max, we had heard of Mr. Erveng's being a publisher, and how the story about his liking fat old ladies had put the idea into our heads to dress up and call on him, and interest ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... said, "With the permission of the company, I will relate a short story. Not long since, some boys were flying a kite in the street, just as a poor boy on horseback rode by, on his way to mill. The horse took fright, and threw the boy, injuring him so badly that he was carried home, and confined for some weeks ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... published in 1879, and the short story Sac au Dos, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, Les Soirees de Medan, show the influence of Les Rougon-Macquart rather than of Germinie Lacerteux. For the time the 'formula' of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... intensified by the checks which want set upon ambition. The passion for authorship reasserted itself with undiminished violence. The history of Corsica was resumed, recast, and vigorously continued, while at the same time the writer completed a short story entitled "The Count of Essex,"—with an English setting, of course,—and wrote a Corsican novel. The latter abounds in bitterness against France, the most potent force in the development of the plot being the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Toledo, Arthur Henry, who turned him toward story-writing. The two had met while Henry was city editor of the Blade, and Dreiser a reporter looking for a job.[21] A firm friendship sprang up, and Henry conceived a high opinion of Dreiser's ability, and urged him to try a short story. Dreiser was distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him, and finally, during a holiday the two spent together at Maumee, Ohio, he made the attempt. Henry had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to Ainslee's Magazine. A week or so later there ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... are not intended to be translated into English. In the Second Year an almost equal amount of time is given to reading, conversation, translation, and grammar. Particular stress is laid upon the study of verbs. A short story or description forms the basis of each lesson, illustrating a grammatical principle and affording an easy and pleasant subject for conversation. The more difficult aspects of French grammar and syntax are treated in the Third Year, and unusual attention ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... public galleries, so long is it likely that we shall continue to be flooded with mediocre likenesses of fashionable people by painters whose highest or whose only achievement they constitute. Anyone can write a "short story" for the cheaper sort of modern journal; only writers like Hardy, Stevenson, or Kipling can give us a ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... use, how much "leading" or space between the lines there shall be, and what shall be the size of the page. In deciding these questions, considerable thinking has to be done. If the manuscript is a short story by a popular author, it may be printed with wide margins and wide leading in order to make a book of fair size. If it is a lengthy manuscript which will be likely to sell at a moderate but not a high price, it is best to use only as much leading as is necessary to make the line stand out clearly, ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... the short story shorter," he said. "She threw me down. In my haberdashery I thought it over. I was blue, bitter. I resolved on a dreadful step. In the night I wrote her a letter, and carried it down to the box and posted it. Life without Arabella, said the letter, was Shakespeare with Hamlet left out. It ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... give a complete listing of his magazine stories here. Adventure Magazine began publication in November 1910, but the earliest issue that I have for reference is that of August 1911. This contains a short story by Mundy, "The Phantom Battery." By this time he was publishing five to eight short stories per year. These early stories were mostly about the British Army and the most important was his "The Soul of A Regiment," (February 1913) a tale of native troops in the ill-fated first expedition ...
— Materials Toward A Bibliography Of The Works Of Talbot Mundy • Bradford M. Day, Editor
... class Fireside Chat was one of the best-known representatives. In exchange for one penny its five hundred thousand readers received every week a serial story about life in highest circles, a short story packed with heart-interest, articles on the removal of stains and the best method of coping with the cold mutton, anecdotes of Royalty, photographs of peeresses, hints on dress, chats about baby, brief but pointed dialogues between Blogson and Snogson, poems, Great ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... who rage against over-great praise, when there is any true foundation for it, I had never been able to understand the laudation of which he was the subject. At that time, and until the fragment of Weir of Hermiston was given to the world, nothing but his one short story about the thief and poet, Villon, had seemed to me to be really great, really to command or even to be an excuse for his being in the position in which his critics had placed him. Yet I had read The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, The Beach of Falesa, Kidnapped, Catriona, The ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... seeing that I have been rather unintentionally led into giving this sort of outline sketch of the course of the Revolution, I want to say a word about the extraordinary access of popular enthusiasm which made a short story of its later stages, especially as it is that period with which the play deals that we ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... can think without first concentrating his thoughts on the subject in hand. Every man and woman should train himself to think clearly. An excellent exercise is to read some short story and then write just an abridged statement. Read an article in a newspaper, and see in how few words you can express it. Reading an article to get only the essentials requires the closest concentration. If you are unable ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... Tiffin-Talk," they wrote, "has been such that we are prepared to offer you our highest terms for a short story of 30,000 words, or thereabouts, to be published in our 'Blue and Silver Series.' We should like to have it a love-story, if possible; but whatever it is, it must be characteristic, and ready for publication in November. We shall need to have the manuscript by September 1st at the ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... in counting Joseph Conrad among her own novelists; although a Pole by birth he is one of the greatest masters of English style. The Polish authors who have written in their own language have perhaps been most successful in the short story. Often it is so slight that it can hardly be called a story, but each of these sketches conveys a distinct atmosphere of the country and the people, and shows the individuality of each writer. The unhappy state of Poland for more than ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... short story, or better still for an operetta. What do you think, Montgomery? Shall I do you a book entitled Lovers in Lent, or A ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... GARRETT wrote his first successful short story at | | the age of fourteen, for which he was awarded a check from | | his editor and a C-minus from his English teacher. Mr. | | Garrett spent his youth in various places in the United | | States—living wherever his Army officer father was | | assigned—and received his higher education at Texas ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the work of an artist in emotion, such as by this time we know Mr. Walpole to be. The trouble was that I had at the moment no wish for artistry. To sum up, I am left with the impression that an uncommonly good short story rather tiresomely distracted my attention from ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... history, but all the time my mind was working, almost unconsciously, on my new fictional problems, "After all, I am a novelist," I wrote to Fuller, and I found time even in the midst of my historical study to compose an occasional short story ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... say about that golden chain of historic cities which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names—Brescia, Verona, Mantua, Padua—are an ornament to one's phrase; but I should have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had done before, toward the end of a summer's day, when the shadows begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... our interest is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a potion, to assure eternity of existence, being made from the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom the distiller of the potion has deprived of life, though it might figure with advantage in a short story of the pattern of the Twice-Told Tales, appears too slender to carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to live forever by concocting ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... contributes a short story in which the hero returns to his home after a report of his death had been believed by his wife and family. The last sentence is worth quoting: "We will now," says the author, "leave Mrs. White and her two children to enjoy the sudden ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... beguiling the solitary hours in weaving crude fancies around people who for any reason interested me. I usually had a mental serial running, to which I returned when it was my mood; but I had never written even a short story. In October, 1871, I was asked to preach for a far uptown congregation in New York, with the possibility of a settlement in view. On Monday following the services of the Sabbath, the officers of the church were kind enough ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... tear 'em off. You couldn't pry those fastenings away with dynamite. When I find a hole in my stockings I'm tickled to death, because it's something to mend. And read? Everything from the Rules of the House tacked up on the door to spelling out the French short story in the back of the Swell Set Magazine. It's getting on my nerves. Do you know what I do Sunday mornings? No, you don't. Well, I go to church, that's what I do. And I get green with envy watching the other women there getting nervous about 11:45 ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... another novel for the Cornhill Magazine. It was a short story, about one volume in length, and was called The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. In this I attempted a style for which I certainly was not qualified, and to which I never had again recourse. It was meant to be funny, was full of slang, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... no one of us who can honestly deny that he is interested in one way or another in the American short story. Indeed, it is hard to find a man anywhere who does not enjoy telling a good story. But there are some people born with the gift of telling a good story better than others, and of telling it in such a way that a great ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... radical advocate for civil rights. She attended the Academy for Negro Youth and was educated as a teacher. She became a professional lecturer, activist, suffragette, poet, essayist, novelist, and the author of the first published short story written by an African-American. Her work ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... of the warlike deeds of such mighty kings as Thutmosis III. and Ramses II. Again, there are documents which belong to the domain of belles-lettres pure and simple. Of these the best known example is the now famous "Tale of Two Brothers"—the prototype of the "modern" short story. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... helping to shape modern journalism and modern every-day English style was large; but the achievement which has given him world-wide fame came late in life. In 1706 he had written a masterly short story, 'The Apparition of Mrs. Veal.' Its real purpose, characteristically enough, was the concealed one of promoting the sale of an unsuccessful religious book, but its literary importance lies first in the extraordinarily ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... critics continued their hopeless hunt, there was growing up in this country a form of fiction which gave promise of some day achieving the task that this never-to-be written novel should accomplish. This form was the short story. It was the work of many hands, in many places. Each writer studied closely a certain locality, and transcribed faithfully what he saw. Thus the New England village, the western ranch, the southern plantation, all had their chroniclers. Nor was it only various localities that we saw in these one-reel ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign. Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of trenches that shifted nearer ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... twenty-seven my first short story appeared in a magazine of considerable weight, due to its advertising pages, but my Uncle Rilas didn't read it until I had convinced him that the honorarium amounted to three hundred dollars. Even then I was obliged to promise him a glimpse of the check ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the Cruel, Cruel Deed Which she had been Led by the Vitreous-Eyed Odalisque of Carved-Ivory to Unintentionally, Unconsciously, and Unresistingly Perpetrate Upon Him; And—to cut a Short Story shorter—she cast her 'Mind's Eye, Horatio,' upon his Queen Anne Mansion Front, and Determined to Bestow upon the Injured Innocent what remained—after Five Seasons—of the Wealth of Her ...
— Love Instigated - The Story of a Carved Ivory Umbrella Handle • Douglass Sherley
... Contemporary History. The Short Story and its Development. Bret Harte. The Local-Color Story and Some Typical Writers. The Novel since 1876. Realism in Recent Fiction. Howells. Mark Twain. Various Types of Realism. Dialect Stories. Joel Chandler Harris. Recent Romances. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... modern short story writers ... movie scenarist ... witty contributor to books of American Comedies ... expert and thoroughly experienced newspaper man, Jack Lait makes the Home Journal (Saturday Magazine) the most interesting and best read magazine section published ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... newspapers and magazines. He is said to receive ten cents a word, and this unusual price is warranted by the eager demand for his stories, of which the reading public is very fond. However, the unknown author does not fare so badly. The sum of from thirty to fifty dollars usually remitted for a short story pays the beginner a better recompense, for the actual time he is engaged upon the work, than any other occupation he ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... "stories," nor did I feel the least urge toward producing fiction. I thirsted to find out how to prepare and market a manuscript to The Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, but the books in the public library were all about the short story and the novel, Sunday "features," the evolution of the printing press or the adventures of a sob ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... short story suggested by one of the subjects below. Make either the characters or their ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... me!' and there on the sunny side of a branch perched a lonesome bit of yellowish down. I went up to see what it was, and found dear little Thistle Goldfinch! He was very glad to see me, and soon told his short story. Through the summer Papa and Mamma Goldfinch and all the brothers and sisters had a fine time, singing together, fluttering over thistletops, or floating through the balmy air. But when 'little Jack Frost walked through the trees,' Papa Goldfinch ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... of unrest within them. A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and saw a boy beside me in a coastguard's uniform. Francesco was on patrol that night; but my English accent soon assured him that I was no contrabbandiere, and he too leaned against the stanchion and told me his short story. He was in his nineteenth year, and came from Florence, where his people live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had all the brightness of the Tuscan folk, a sort of innocent malice mixed with espieglerie. It was diverting to see the airs he gave himself on the strength of his new military ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... nineteen volumes. His patriotic verse is fervid, his idyls are graceful and his humorous verse delightful. The short story he ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... changed, and her destiny is made to hang in the balance for some time in a natural, but very effective, manner. The writer has a deep knowledge of the principles and actions of human feeling, and a thorough grasp of the art, by no means so easy as it looks, of telling a short story in a very engaging style. Plot, surprise, struggle, unfolding of character, and much else which is regarded as contributing to excellence in such a composition, ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... upon later American writers, especially those who wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... novelties" of the season. Or perhaps a newspaper would be a still better simile. First there is the 'interpellation,'[C] once at least every day; that corresponds to the leading article. Then there are questions for ministers on this, that and the other trivial occurrence; that is the serial or short story. Then there is a bill brought in about something that happened the night before, that is the special article. Then some deputy assaults his neighbour, this is ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... "It's a short story; in fact if you like it's not a story at all," he rattled on, "though a novelist might work it up into a novel in an idle hour. It's rather an interesting little incident, Praskovya Ivanovna, and I am sure that Lizaveta Nikolaevna will be interested to hear it, because there are a great ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... holocaust of Alexandria. The folk and fairy tales devoted to the cat, of which there are many, are based on an understanding, although often superficial, of cat traits. But the moderns, speaking generally, have not been able to do justice, in the novel or the short story, to this occult and lovable ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... struggling moon, no mist, no long-winded passages upon the genial earth, no the sense of the night, no marvels of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees—just a short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen over the detestable parched ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... business, but in spite of which he managed to crawl away." And there are little kakophonies, such as: "He was loved, openly and gladly, back." The work is good enough to make worth while the cleansing of these defects. The author certainly puts into a short story more thought and characterisation than is common in these days of half-hours with even the best authors through the medium of magazine pot-boilers. Wild Honey (CONSTABLE) is the title of the first (not quite the best) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... Dr. Cupid. For some reason or another the second part of this story was never forthcoming, and my copy arriving in the nick of time was used to stop the gap. It brought me a regular commission, and month by month thereafter, for quite a considerable time, I contributed a short story to the Belgravia Magazine. Very early in the history of this connection a curious accident happened. I was looking forward to a cheque for seventeen guineas and it came to me as a surprise when, from paymasters so scrupulously punctual, no cheque arrived at the date fixed for ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong. The denouement of a long story is nothing; it is just a "full close," which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning. Well, I shall end by finishing it against my judgment; that fragment is my Delilah. Golly, it's good. I am not shining by modesty; but I do just love the colour and movement of that piece so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alluring prize for a short story, and Tig wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations, and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honore; Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and dramatic force,—Tig's ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... intervals, like early swallows, to herald, it is to be hoped, a larger flight. When the larger flight appears, the winter of our discontent will have passed, and we shall be able to boast that the short story can make a home east as well as west of the Atlantic. There is plenty of human nature—of the Scottish variety, which is a very good variety—in 'The Stickit Minister' and its companion stories; plenty of humour, too, of that dry, pawky kind which is a monopoly of 'Caledonia, stern ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the time to copy out the orchestra parts of my overture to Faust, which I was still hoping to hear at the Conservatoire; and by the way of counteracting the depression produced by this humiliating occupation, I wrote a short story, Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven (A Pilgrimage to Beethoven), which appeared in the Gazette Musicale, under the title Une Visite a Beethoven. Schlesinger told me candidly that this little work had created quite ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... softly and approvingly up at Adrian's face; she was pleased with its expression; she was pleased yet more with words of which women rather than men would acknowledge the truth. Adrian returned the look with one of deep and eloquent sympathy and respect; in fact, the short story he had heard from Montreal had interested him deeply in her; and never to the brilliant queen, to whose court he was bound, did his manner wear so chivalric and earnest a homage as it did to that lone and ill-fated lady on the twilight shores ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... above, I also from time to time wrote for the magazines—for the Edinburgh Quarterly, for the National, the Nineteenth Century, the Contemporary, and once or twice, I think, in the Fortnightly. I even perpetrated a short story in a magazine now deceased—a story which, by the way, if I had time to adapt it, might, I think, make an excellent cinema film. The title was good—"The Snake Ring." It was a story of a murder in the High Alps, when ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... that as a short story," Owen suggested. And the two friends began to argue as to the number of lovers which fell to the lot of fashionable women, from the age of twenty-three to fifty. Two or three ladies were mentioned whose liaisons reached a couple of hundred, and ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... dozen names from the foreign list just given are synonymous with the best fiction of the period. Yet the short story as practised in its native home continues to excel the short story written in other lands. The English, the Russian, the French, it is being contended in certain quarters, write better literature. They do not, therefore, write better stories. If literature is of a magnificent depth ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... over everybody. Roy Beaumont will say you look mythological. Oh, and poor Mr. Ridokanaki! You'll refuse him to-night, I suppose! What fun it must be to be a pretty girl going about refusing people in conservatories—like a short story in a magazine! I've forgotten how I did it. In a year, darling? Quite. I say, have I overdone the dix-huitieme business? Do I look like a fancy ball? Pass me a hairpin, dear. No, don't. I suppose you know that Chetwode has never seen this dress! What do you ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... expiation for others. One might say that he came into the world only to give a lasting example of the instability of human greatness. When he was at the point of death, worn out with suffering, he said sadly, "My birth and my death comprise my whole history." But this short story is perhaps richer in instruction than the longest reigns. The Emperor's son will be known for many ages by his three titles,—the King of Rome, Napoleon II., and the Duke of Reichstadt. He had already inspired ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the St. James's Gazette and found that they paid two pounds instead of the guinea of the Globe, and again, naturally enough, devoted most of my attention to the St. James's Gazette. From the essay or literary paper, I somehow got into the habit of the short story, and did a good many of these, still for the St. James's, till in the autumn of 1890, I wrote a tale called "The Double Return." Well, Oscar Wilde asked: "Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it was very good." But: ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... long in the Quarter he looks at life from the Parisian angle. His knowledge of literature is such that he might be a Professor, but he would rather be a vagabond of letters. We talk shop. We discuss the American short story, but MacBean vows they do these things better in France. He says that some of the contes printed every day in the Journal are worthy of Maupassant. After that he buys more beer, and we roam airily over the fields of literature, plucking here and ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... punishment. She removed to Rhode Island and later to New York, where she and all her family, with the exception of one person, were killed by the Indians. As Thomas Welde says in the preface of A Short Story of the Rise, Wane and Ruin of the Antinomians (1644): "I never heard that the Indians in these parts did ever before commit the like outrage upon any one family, or families; and therefore God's hand is the more apparently seen herein, to ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Wanderer, bending his head courteously and advancing another step, "I can neither frame excuses for having entered your house unbidden, nor hope to obtain indulgence for my intrusion, unless you are willing in the first place to hear my short story. May ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... fanatics of the principle of unity is to get the impression that these mysterious "artistic qualities" are things that may be thrust into a work from outside, after a careful perusal of, shall we say, Flaubert's Letters to Madame Something-or-other, or a course of studies of the Short Story at Columbia University. Chop the thing quite clear of all "surplusage and irrelevancy"; chop it clear of all "unnecessary detail"; chop the descriptions and chop the incidents; chop the characters; "chop it and pat it ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... a young man, I had projected a lecture on the Hoosier folk-speech, and had even printed during the war a little political skit in that dialect in a St. Paul paper. So far as I know, nothing else had ever been printed in the Hoosier. Under the spur of Taine's argument, I now proceeded to write a short story wholly in the dialect spoken in my childhood by rustics on the north side of the Ohio River. This tale I called "The Hoosier School-Master." It consisted almost entirely of an autobiographical narration in dialect by Mirandy Means of the incidents that ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... unheard. Whether narration or description should precede appears yet to be undetermined; for many text-books treat one first, and perhaps as many the other. I have thought it wiser to begin with the short story, because it is easier to gain free, spontaneous expression with narration than with description. To write a whole page of description is a task for a master, and very few attempt it; but for the uninitiated amateur about ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... afraid to tell the story—reading it aloud will not be half so effective. Select a fable or a short story first. Read it carefully, and then shut the book and think about it. Be sure you have the plot in your mind, make the hero and the other characters seem very real to yourself, picture the scenes vividly in your mind's eye, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... have made an excellent short story, but to pursue its farcical developments through three hundred pages requires a considerable amount of perseverance. The scene of Mr. PETER BLUNDER'S book is laid in tropical Jallagar, where the British Resident was keener on cats than on his duties. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author, a short story entitled The Cloak; this idea has been wittily expressed by another compatriot, who says: "We have all ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the contemporary short story as I find it in American magazines, is its curious sophistication. Its bloom is gone. I have read through dozens of periodicals without finding one with fresh feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes because his story urges him. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... completely susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset the judgment of artists ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... said Mme. de la Baudraye, drawing a pile of manuscript from beneath her sofa cushion, "will you pardon me in our present straits for making a short story of something which you told me a ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... as if Bertrand's refusal to play the dirty game didn't prevent that man from finding some one who was willing to sell his soul for money," was the way Tom wound up his short story. ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... when she was a child. But who she is, or where he picked her up, or what is her name, Blyth never has told anybody, and never will. She's the dearest, kindest, prettiest little soul that ever lived; and that's all I know about her. It's a short story, old boy; but ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... the marquis's questionable irony, "will you permit me to tell you a short story before approaching the subject ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... present in the midst of a bewildering quantity of play-publication and production. The one-act play in particular, chiefly represented in this volume, appears to be taking the place of that rather squeezed sponge, the short story, in the favor of the reading public. Of course, this tendency has its reaction in schoolrooms. One even hears of high-school classes which attempt to keep up with the entire output of such dramas in English ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... clucked and chuckled to herself, highly diverted with their astonishment. How did she know it? What that old woman did not know would make but a short story. 'T was said she had informants over the whole countryside, like a ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... persiflage. The Voltairean tradition has been his guide—a great deal of wit and satire, very little feeling, no simplicity. It is a combination of qualities which serves eminently well for satire, for journalism, and for paper warfare of all kinds, but which is much less suitable to the novel or short story, for cleverness is not poetry, and the novel is still within the domain of poetry, although on the frontier. The vague discomfort aroused in one by these epigrammatic productions is due probably to a confusion of kinds. Ambiguity of style ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "'Tis a short story. Oi can't tell ye much, owin' to orders from the old gent hisself. He came shortly after th' death of the first Bar, Senestro's brother. Seems there was some rumpus aboot th' old Rhamda Avec, which same Oi always kept away from—him as was goin' ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only: a Novelette is a brief Novel. But the difference between a Novel and a Short story is a difference of kind, A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... of Maupassant's cynicism was just that variation of the artistic idea upon the temperament which puts the best finish upon work necessarily so limited, obliged to be so clenching, as the short story. Flaubert's gigantic dissatisfaction with life, his really philosophic sense of its vanity, would have overweighted a writer so thoroughly equipped for his work as the writer of "Boule de Suif" and "La Maison Tellier." ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... expressed, or than perhaps we could perfectly understand[1188]. As Johnson and I accompanied Sir Joshua Reynolds in his coach, Johnson said, 'There is in Beauclerk a predominance over his company, that one does not like. But he is a man who has lived so much in the world, that he has a short story on every occasion; he is always ready to talk, and is ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... to read only the New Testament. On winter Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my mental vision every day of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... A short story, say the writers of text books and the teachers of sophomores, should deal with but a single episode. That dictum is probably true; but it admits of wider interpretation than is generally given it. The teller of tales, anxious to escape ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... might be called, without in this case any disparagement, the commercial short story, I think I should place Mr. P. G. WODEHOUSE as easily my favourite. The comfortable anticipation that is always mine on observing his name on the contents page of a popular magazine has been renewed by the sight of it attached to a collection of tales in volume ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... sitting behind a little table, ringing a bell sharply, and saying, 'Now, girls, pay attention, please.'" She turned her large melancholy eyes on her sister. "Edith thinks she's the only writer in the family, but in the intervals of teaching I intend to surprise her. I've already had one short story accepted by an obscure but bona fide magazine which hasn't ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... poem, The two Pigeons, and of Moliere's comedy, Amphitryon—both so altered in the interpretation that they seem more like originals than translations; prose tales that are admirable examples of this form—The Marquise of O., The Earthquake in Chili, and the first part of the masterly short story Michael Kohlhaas; and the recasting of the unique comedy The Broken Jug. Finally he attempted another great drama in verse, Penthesilea, embodying in the old classical story the tragedy of his own desperate struggle for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... so cheap, and so bewildering in colour and make-up, that I sometimes think our children are losing their perspective and caring for none of them as I loved my few plain little ones filled with short story and poem, almost no illustration. I had a treasure house in the school books of my elders, especially the McGuffey series of Readers from One to Six. For pictures I was driven to the Bible, dictionary, historical works read by my father, agricultural papers, and medical ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... which is to be written chapter by chapter, week after week, by well-known writers of fiction, without consultation with their collaborateurs. We did the same thing years ago. However, as the notion is still calculated to amuse and instruct our readers, we subjoin a short story, which has been written on the same terms by the entire strength of a paper—political, sporting, and social. It will ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... Higginson (1862-1940), an American writer, lived in Bellingham, on Puget Sound, Washington. She won a prize of five hundred dollars, offered by a magazine for the best short story. ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... correct printing in the United States. You shall have the proof to read, with the greatest pleasure. On second thoughts, why shouldn't I send you the children's proof by this same post? I will, as I have it here, send it under another cover. When you return it, you shall have the short story. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... raised the question of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in 1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning's place of summer sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning's hand. It was an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... appeal. There's a deal of charity in this good city, and when the people do wake up they work with a will; but I can't help thinking that if some of the money lavished on luxuries was spent on necessaries for the poor, there would be fewer tragedies like that which ended yesterday. It's a short story, easy to tell, though long and hard to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... excellent dinner to his enemy, points out to him his faults in the most gentlemanly fashion, and then proceeds to poison him with a specially prepared cigar. I can see the whole thing in the form of a short story." ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... justly admired for the wonderful accuracy of its local colour, and for a masterly knowledge of Chinese character; but the writer drew exclusively from encyclopaedias and books of travel. In my judgment, he was at his best in the Short Story. He practised that difficult art long before it became popular, and a book called originally People, Places, and Things, but now Humorous Stories, is a masterpiece of fun, invention, and observation. In 1874, he became "Reader" ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... accompanying this volume, gives the chronological sequences of its contents. The first story of all, "A Short Story of Love and Marriage," she wrote when she was eight years old. "The True History of Leslie Woodcock" was written three years later, after "The Young Visiters" had been written. "Where Love Lies Deepest" ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... need of money came to an end. He was full of ideas, and likely to begin a new article or story at any time. He wrote and published a number of notable sketches, articles, stories, even books, during these later years, among them that marvelous short story—"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." In that story, as in most of his later work, he proved to the world that he was much more than a humorist—that he was, in fact, a great teacher, moralist, philosopher —the greatest, perhaps, of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of chairs and tables, just consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... found one at length on the floor underneath the counter. With it in my pocket, I retraced my footsteps as in a dream. On a seat in Paddington Green I sat down and read it. The hundred best books! I have waded through them all; they have never charmed me as charmed me that one short story in that now forgotten journal. Need I add it was a sad and sentimental composition. Once upon a time there lived a mighty King; one—but with the names I will not bore you; they are somewhat unpronounceable. Their ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... paternal occupations in a small way, he continued to maintain the family and give some education to the younger children. His character for truth, honesty, and energy was recognized, and he gradually achieved independence and aided his brethren to start in life. Such was his short story ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... on "The Readers' Corner." Isn't an eight and nine-page section a bit too much? A short story has been suggested—good idea. Why not limit it to a maximum of, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... in his absence I was divorced from him in accordance with the laws of Kansas State. I then went to San Francisco about property of my mother's, which my husband had fraudulently sold to a countryman of ours now resident in Paris,—having forged my name. There I met you, and in that short story I tell you all that there is to be told. It may be that you do not believe me now; but if so, are you not bound to go where you can verify your ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... discussion. Here is a short story of two ladies. They are not in our competition, though among its most ardent well-wishers. A friend had given one of them a bit of green, woody growth some two feet high and half an inch thick. She had a wee square bit of front grass-plot something larger than a table-cloth, but certainly not large ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... short story, lad. When I went overboard from the rowboat, I caught hold of some of the wreckage from the schooner. This was still fast to the deck, and by hauling myself in I soon got on board again. As I had no boat, I remained on board, ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... this phase of Maupassant's nature was the peculiar feeling of loneliness that every now and then breaks irresistibly forth in the course of some short story. Of kindly soul and genial heart, he suffered not only from the oppression of spirit caused by the lack of humanity, kindliness, sanity, and harmony which he encountered daily in the world at large, but he had an ever abiding sense of the invincible, unbanishable solitariness ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers, must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily unjust. It will be sufficient if I refer—pretty much at random—to the short story of 'Phoebe Dawson' in the 'Parish Register,' to the more elaborate stories of 'Edward Shore' and the 'Parting Hour' in the 'Tales,' or to the story of 'Ruth' in the 'Tales of the Hall,' where again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... few lines, say 1,000 words, a sheet of paper. My writing is very small. It was tucked into a half-penny open envelope—a magazine office envelope, marked 'Proof, urgent.' There were the proofs of a short story in ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... for children, find a short story and put it into dialogue form. It will be wise to select a story that already contains a large proportion ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... and on pages 93 and 94 of the Report the description of a thunderstorm is very much like Birdie's idea of the same in the 'Dew Fairies' on page 59 and 60 of my book. What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have! If she had remembered and written down accurately, a short story, and that soon after hearing it, it would have been a marvel; but to have heard the story once, three years ago, and in such a way that neither her parents nor teacher could ever allude to it or refresh her memory about it, and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... quite right to speak in that thankful tone. It's a horrid little paper—all brown-paper patterns and advice to the lovelorn and puzzles. I do a short story for it every week, under various names. A duke or an earl goes with each story. I ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... novels, to convince us that true virtue appears in tights and short petticoats and is only to be found in ballet girls. I fear that the popular voice is right as a general rule, but is equally true that here and there one finds a pearl in the dust, and even in the dirt, and the short story that I am about to relate, will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... work than little exquisite work—though I suppose that we shall come to the latter sometime, when the treasures of art have accumulated even more hopelessly than now, and when nothing but perfect work will have a chance of recognition. Then perhaps a man will spend thirty years in writing a short story, and twenty more in polishing it! But at present there is much that is unsaid which may well be said, and I confess that I do not hanker after this careful and troubled work. It reminds me of the terrible story of the Chinaman who spent fifty years in painting a vase which cracked in ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a short story," he replied quietly. "Unless I tell you, you cannot understand. I have set my life upon your love, and I have gone so far that I cannot save my life except by you—my life and my honour. Will you listen ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... imagine yourself to be. You should have sent forth something smaller. You should have made the reading world familiar with a style, too original, and of too large a power and scope, to please quickly. A volume of ballads and idyls—a short story in simple verse—would have prepared the way for your dramatic poem. Suppose Goethe had begun his literary career with the second part of 'Faust'! He was too wise for that, and wrote himself into popularity with ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... facts through he has exercised his mind,—given himself a mental breather. But the claims of the true mystery story do not end with the general reader. It is entitled to the consideration of the discriminating because it indubitably takes its own place as a gauge of mastery in the field of the short story. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... it, too," agreed Mabel. "I am more interested in psychology, though I like my essay and short story work best of all. I'm going in for interpretative reading, too. All that sort of thing will help me in my work when ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... give some account of the places in which Mr. Stockton's stories and novels were written, and their environments. Some of the Southern stories were written in Virginia, and, now and then, a short story elsewhere, as suggested by the locality, but the most of his work was done under his own roof-tree. He loved his home; it had to be a country home, and always had to have a garden. In the care of a garden and in driving, he found his ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... soul in Altoona that I ever knew. Yet I was not discouraged, but took the three young men with me to the railroad superintendent's office, and told the superintendent I had come on a queer errand, and told my short story. "And now I solicit the favor of a pass for myself and these three young men. But you do not know whether I have given you a truthful representation, for I have not so much as a scratch of a pen with ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... window and see men as columns walking. Even the sanctity of their own hearts, their self-respect, their most private emotions are disregarded. The wife is infected with the taint. Her private opinion of her husband she makes into a short story—forgets its origin and shows it him with pride—while the husband decants his heart-beats into occasional verse and minor poetry. It is amazing what a lot of latter-day literature consists of such breaches of confidence. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells |
