Short Story Writer Quotes

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.

Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.

Not the why but the what.

... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope).

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.

Live it up so you can write it down.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I passed by the brothel as thoughpast the house of a beloved.

As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

Every man needs a place to go to.

The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

Man is bound to lie about himself

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.

I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Life [had] replaced logic.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.

I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.

Coming at twenty to his father's house, which was a very sink of filthy debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in a dependent position, and so was sensitive and ready to take offense, met him at first with distrust and sullenness.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.

his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.

Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.