#short

When I was seventeen I found a man, or maybe he found me. Away from home for the first time, out of reach of my father’s archaic restrictions and my mother’s culinary insistence, I cut off my hair, dropped my Christian name, wore black and toyed with anorexia, passing incognito among the city workers, just another ant in that vast heap. ↗

— Nell Grey

#objects-of-desire #short-story-collection #solstice #home

Most folks don't have but a few days to a week's worth of food in their houses at any given time. When they run out, they'll have to forage. Only the fools will forage in town. The smart ones will look on the outskirts. ↗

— Edward M. Wolfe

#food #food-storage #fool #fools #forage

I'm the crazy girly captain, Remember? ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#humor #humor

I'm LEP. A captain. No rent-a-cop gnome is going to stand in the way of my orders. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#humor #humor

Like life is short,” he said. “Like you don’t know when it’s going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can’t ever be said. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#life

He clung to her more tightly, knotting his hands in her hair, trying to tell her, with the press of his mouth on hers, all the things he could never say out loud: I love you; I love you and I don’t care that you’re my sister; don’t be with him, don’t want him, don’t go with him. Be with me. Want me. Stay with me. I don’t know how to be without you. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#city-of-ashes #clary-fray #forbidden-love #jace-wayland #mortal-instruments

The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn’t seen in a long time, passion. ↗

— Suzan Battah

#romance #short-story #soul-mates #true-love #love

I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153] ↗

— Kim Edwards

#age

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage. ↗

— Jonathan Carroll

#novels #short-fiction #short-stories #writing #writing-process

Short first pregnancies do not occasion criticism in our valley, for it is widely known that the good Lord often makes first pregnancies mercifully brief as His reward to the girl for having preserved her chastity until marriage. Subsequent pregnancies, however, usually run their full terms, which only makes sense, as the very fact that they are not first pregnancies means that the mother was not chaste at the moment of conception. ↗

— Trevanian

#the-apple-tree #marriage