#short

But that which is called a Flower by any other name would still be as trusting and they were not to change her. In fact, she grew only more Hothouse-gorgeous as the bitterness poured down and off and around her and flooded the town, fertilizing crops, drowning fields, providing new homes for water birds and their babies, and bringing people from villages all around to swim in their beautiful blue lakes and marvel in the wonders of a village no longer called Numbskull but instead 'Miroslava' which means 'peace and glory.' "Numbskull's Flower and the Well-Meaning Poets Society." First published in State of Imagination ↗

— Meg Sefton

#short-story #slipstream #young-adult-fiction #beauty

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign. ↗

— Theodore White

#anywhere #campaign #excitement #match #presidential

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#short-story #change

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting. ↗

— Stefan Zweig

#fleeting #history #moments #prevail #reason

Summer's lease hath all too short a date. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#summer #dating

she should have told me that times slides away on a hillside of lose shale and takes everything in its path-dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all. ↗

— Kristin Hannah

#short-story #dreams

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#dream #dreaming #inception #jorge-luis-borges #la-escritura-del-dios

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#poe #short-stories #the-cask-of-amontillado #equality

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for? ↗

— C.S. Friedman

#dark #fear #short-sentences #experience

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy) Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy) In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy) Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy) I’ve entered into your feelings; it’s your turn now. (Empathy) ↗

— D.R. Mirror

#death-and-dying #empathy #fiction #short-story #death