#story

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror. ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#night #short-story

If the prisoner is beaten, it is an arrogant expression of fear. ↗

— Ghassan Kanafani

#prisoners #resistance #short-story

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. ↗

— Paolo Bacigalupi

#short-fiction #short-stories #short-story #short-story

He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story ↗

— Ted Dekker

#short-story

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#truth #short-story

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night. ↗

— Angela Carter

#wolf #wolves #short-story

Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you. ↗

— Angela Carter

#wolf #wolves #short-story

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world. — Winston S. Churchill ↗

— Ellen Brazer

#espionage #historical-novel #history #holocaust #intrigue

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#apathy #apolitical #determinism #historical-determinism #history

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot. ↗

— Simon Schama

#history #historical