"Short story" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the twenty-second of December. I fixed that while I was writing it, for that was the day it happened on," said aunty. "That will be next Monday, and this is Friday. Not so very long to wait. And after all it's a very short story—not nearly so long ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... interpretation of fact. Here it is on a 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... a short story long, we got under way again, and, with speed unabated, spanked along at full twelve miles an hour for five miles farther. There, down a wild looking glen, on the left hand, comes brawling, over stump and stone, a tributary streamlet, by the side of which a rough track, made ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... 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
... except the powerful tragic tale 'La Grande Breteche,' which was subsequently incorporated in 'Autre etude de femme,' This story of a jealous husband's walling up his wife's lover in a closet of her chamber is as dramatic a piece of writing as Balzac ever did, and is almost if not quite as perfect a short story as any that has since been written in France. 'La Maison du chat-qui-pelote' has been mentioned already on account of its importance in the evolution of Balzac's realism, but while a delightful novelette, it is hardly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... 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. A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... by her name in this letter, but we are such friends now that I do so when we are quietly together, and she speaks to me by my name—I mean, not my Christian name, but the name you gave me. When she began to call me Amy, I told her my short story, and that you had always called me Little Dorrit. I told her that the name was much dearer to me than any other, and so she calls ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... 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 you ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... off, just when the nail is driven home, and before the hammer begins to bruise the wood. The art lies in discovering this moment of cessation and using it to the best advantage. That is the fascination of the real 'short story' as told by Hawthorne, or Poe, or Stevenson, or Cable, or De Maupassant, or Miss Jewett, or Margaret Deland. It reaches the point of interest and stops. The impression is not blurred. It is like a well-cut ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... not only in folk songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry, crude or skilful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive detail. In their unconscious art, exhibited in many a fine and powerful short story, they are a contribution to the realistic writing of the Negro. Beneath all the surface contradictions and exaggerations, the fantasy and flattery, they possess an essential truth and humanity which surpasses as it supplements history ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... 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 readings. If this is not merely an apologue, it is certainly a horrible example. The bulk ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... later the manuscript was polished and typewritten, ready for the test. Spurlock felt very well pleased with himself. To have written a short story in a week ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... home. Just then I heard the saddest little voice pipe out: 'Dear-ie me! Dear-ie 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 said: 'It ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... 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 ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... [Translator's Note.]) Balzac was happy and irresponsible, he laughed his deep, resounding laugh of joyous days, that laugh which no misfortune could quite extinguish. He was carefree and elated, and found the strength to write a short story, Honorine, without taking coffee. He indulged in jests; the Emperor of Russia, he declared, valued him to the extent of thirty-two roubles, for that was the cost of his permit of residence. And heart and soul he gave himself up to his ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... particularly as they apply to his books. No attempt is being made to 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 ...
— Materials Toward A Bibliography Of The Works Of Talbot Mundy • Bradford M. Day, Editor
... 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 Lover's Lent? ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... 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 ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... 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
... crowd in upon us more rapidly, they may be more congruously chosen for a definite effect than in our actual life. The total effect may then be no less pronounced. In discovering how this is brought about we shall find the art of the short story. ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... I imagined that I was in love for an hour, for a day. I had foolishly yielded to the influence of surrounding circumstances. I allowed myself to be beguiled by a mirage of Dawn. Would you like me to tell you this short story? ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... three, she was raised by her uncle, a teacher and 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
... Thacker. "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run. Now, here's a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott. It's rotten. What ...
— Options • O. Henry
... simple, were about equally engaged. We shall probably agree that the most important object of fiction is to produce in the reader a state of feeling, just as musical composition is intended to produce a state of feeling—the short story being comparable with a brief musical production intended to produce a single variety of emotion; the novel, to the music of an opera with its many parts, intended each to excite a particular state of feeling. Naturally prose fiction may, and almost necessarily does, have ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... fourth girl to be asked. She rose to her feet and said gravely, "I would propose that Susie Rushworth and the other members of the Specialities have their games and fun afterwards; but I have a short story to tell, and I should like to tell it first, if ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... 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 convincing ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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
... 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, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... RANDALL 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
... is no room for mystery within the limits of this short story,—to tell, I say, at a word the plain and simple truth, Captain Broughton had already asked that question. On the day before he left Oxney Colne he had in set terms proposed to the parson's daughter, and indeed the words, ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... syndicate (117 Tribune Building) want a story of 5,000 words (lowest limit of their London agent) for $1,000 and offer to plank the check on delivery, and it was partly to meet that demand that I took that other holiday. So as I have no short story that suits me (and can't and shan't make promises), the best I can do is to offer the longer one which I finished on my second ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... life and education, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my heart; of the English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember old sympathies, it was like seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a short story, I had to return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysees for my characters. That I should have forgotten so much in ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impossible by many, but that is because few are ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 I ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to make a short story of it, and left the two "conversationists," to wit, the angel Raphael and the gentleman,—there was but one gentleman in society then, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the lecture. Now you may rest a little, and look about, and then I will tell you a short story." ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... dropped in at that chamber of horrors, the Grand Guignol, in the Rue Chaptal. There they saw "Mademoiselle Fifi," a playlet lasting less than half an hour, adapted by the late Oscar Metenier from Guy de Maupassant's short story. It was the tale of a young Prussian officer who gets into a French country house during the war of 1870, abuses the aristocrats who live there, shoots out the eyes of the family portraits, entertains at supper a number of loose French girls from Rouen, ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... minutest particle of it mixes with the blood; and others again have maintained that it is not strong enough to kill an animal of the size and strength of a man. The first have erred by lending a too willing ear to the marvellous and believing assertions without sufficient proof. The following short story points out the necessity ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... before. But I have not told a single person until to-day, not even Mother or Mollie. Months before I came to Washington, just before school commenced, I saw a notice in a newspaper, saying that a prize would be given for a short story written by a schoolgirl between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. So, up in the little attic at Laurel Cottage, I wrote a story. I worked on it for days and days, and then I sent it off to the publisher. I was ashamed to tell ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... offered an 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 own words,—and mailed the same. He ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the actors was Gustav Wied, a Danish playwright and novelist, whose exquisite art since then has won him European fame. In the audience was Ola Hansson, a Swedish novelist and poet who had just published a short story from which Strindberg, according to his own acknowledgment on playbill and title-page, had taken the name and the theme ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... had to find 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 ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and surprising modulations. While neither sublime nor deeply introspective, they make the simple, direct appeal of a lovely flower. In the development of music they are as important as the modern short story in the field of literature; which, in distinction to the old "three-decker" novel, often really says more and says it so concisely that our interest never flags. This tendency to the short, independent piece had been begun by Beethoven in his Bagatelles (French "trifles"); but ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... 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 from restriction but ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... variety 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... kind of type to 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 ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... me most in 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. And when with relief I do encounter ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... inventing plots." In the present selection, however, he has both conceived an original type of character in the mysterious heroine, and invented an ingenious situation, if not plot, and so, in one instance at least, has achieved a short story classic. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... papers, had all gone on, and there was not a 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
... Let him, let him, let him make thee as sad. He hath a tongue can banish thee from joy, And chase thy crimson colour from thy cheeks. Why speak'st thou not? I pray thee, Little John, Let the short story of my long distress Be utter'd in a word. What, mean'st thou to protract? Wilt thou not speak? then, Marian, list to me. This day thou wert a maid, and now a spouse, Anon, poor soul, a widow thou must be! Thy Robin is an outlaw, Marian; His goods and land must ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... 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 own doubts or ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... a story book for children, find a short story and put it into dialogue form. It will be wise to select a story that already contains ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature—such a sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"—the matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short story, entirely on this principle ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... we had news from the Jarl, and strange enough it was. My father came back two days afterwards and told us all, and so I may as well make a short story of it. The ways of Gunnar Kirkeban had been his end, for a certain Viking chief, a Norseman, had wintered in Wales during the past winter, and there he had heard from the Welsh of the wrongs that they had suffered at his hands. Also he had heard ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... 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 hillocks of this ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... books which are at present coming singly and at long 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 and ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the friendly accommodation of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of all the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except for the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the book called Tales of Space and Time, no short story of mine of the slightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering. And the task of selection and revision brings home to me with something of the effect of discovery that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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
... it a short story. About my wager I'm by no means sorry. And if I gain my end with glory Allow me to exult from a full breast. Dust shall he eat and that with zest, Like my old aunt, the snake, whose ...
— Faust • Goethe
... stories are "The Amethyst Box" and "The Ruby and the Caldron," by Anna Katharine Green, the latter published in the same volume with another short story, "The House in the Mist," by the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... had not yet written a novel. All—all my pretty ones—had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years' standing who should never have made a run. Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 world ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... agreeable to write about, he didn't write at all, like a young scamp as he was, and when the time came that he had something pleasant to communicate, it was too late, as his father was no more, and his only brother (your father) was gone nobody knew where. Well, to make a short story of it, that chap, your uncle, was knocked about in the world, sometimes up and sometimes down, but at last found himself pretty strong upon his legs, and then made up his mind to come back to Old England, where he found nobody to care for him, and went ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... fifty years 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 writing ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... nothing for you to tell,—since you blurted out your short story of love that day over the waterfall, when I tried so hard to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... 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 Zola has ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the rush of modern life, particularly in America, the short story has come to be the most popular type of fiction. Just as the quickly seen, low-priced moving picture show is taking the place of the drama, with the average person, so the short stories that are found so plentifully in the numerous periodicals ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... they look out of 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. And not ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... reply to your courteous communication, let me say that had I seen the close of your short story, I should have grasped the situation more fully, and should doubtless have refrained from giving ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the Social Sciences in Antioch College. Author of The Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Red-men do the same." Then giving his anxious Indian friend a look, to re-assure him of his innocence, he turned to the rest of his attentive and interested listeners, as he continued in English, "I have a short story to tell, and he that believes it will believe the truth, and he that disbelieves it will only lead himself astray, and perhaps his neighbour too. We were all out-lying about your camp, friend squatter, as by this ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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
... 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 is given to all points ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... horses had brains no better than those of hens, but proportionately larger, they would not be drawing wagons, and carrying men upon their backs, but would be lecturing to women's clubs, and holding chairs in universities, and writing essays on the Development of the Short Story ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the domain of the short story Kipling is easily the first great creative artist of his time. No one approaches him in vivid descriptive power, in keen character portraiture, in the faculty of making a strange and alien life as real to us as the life we have ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... time and place for short story-telling. Like everything else it is all right in its appropriate setting. Lincoln used it to advantage, but once said: "I believe I have the popular reputation of being a story-teller, but I do not deserve the name in its general sense; for it is not the story ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... was the short story, to which he gave a new vogue. Translated into many tongues, his tales became the source of knowledge to a large part of the people of Europe as to California and the Pacific. He associated the Far West with romance, and we have ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... much the short story really told, her eyes far away on the elusive, ever-receding blue curtain that was down ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... the other pole of life when his thoughts went back to the time when the old folks gathered around the campfire, and as a small lad he listened to their oft-repeated stories. "I can hardly remember them, but I will tell you a short story: There was a great big spider carrying a big roll of straw on his back, and he was running along between two lakes. There was a great big flock of geese on one of the lakes. One of the geese yelled over to the spider: 'Spider, where ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... were firm in their belief that her death was an appropriate 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 pick out this woful woman, to make her and those belonging ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... steadily at Orsino while speaking. When he ceased, he began to walk about the small room with something of his old energy. Orsino roused himself. He had almost begun to forget his own position in the interest of listening to the count's short story. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... from old Bernique himself, the short story that had connected the affections of the tramp-boy and the wandering prospector. Piney, Old Bernique had said, was the child of a woman whom he had known in St. Louis in the old days. Old Bernique, who was only middle-aged Bernique then, had lived as a neighbour to the woman, whom he ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... entitled 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 its delivery. I ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... 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 selection had cost me many hours of study in the British Museum reading-rooms, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 Minister ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... desire turning in another direction. When the landscape on the canvas seemed hopelessly inadequate, he laid aside the brush for the pencil, and strove to interpret the summer fields in verse. From verse he drifted into the article and the short story, and from the story into the play. And it was in this last form that he felt himself strongest, and various were the dramas and comedies that he dreamed from year's end ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... (readable poetry) is divided into poetry which is chiefly epical, lyrical, and dramatic, with the tertiary division of moving, comic, tragic, and humoristic; and poetry which can all be read at once, like a short story, or that requires several sittings, like ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... "don't go. It's only a short story I promised for a Christmas number. They offered me fifteen cents a word and promised to put my name on the cover in red, so I couldn't very well refuse. It's no inspiration, though, I tell you that." He rose and pressed a bell behind him and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 demonstration ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... have a very short story to tell you to-day about myself. Years ago, when I was a little boy, my Sabbath school teacher told us a story, one morning, which was the means of bringing me to Jesus. I have to thank that lady, next to God, that I am standing here to-day a minister of Christ. She was not our regular teacher, ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... quite overwhelming desire to admit this girl into his jealously-guarded confidence. "From something you said just now I gathered that you had been good enough to spare a thought for me now and then. Does that mean that your kindness would extend so far as to allow you to listen to a very short story in which I, unfortunately, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... asked to 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 two greatest sources ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... not, and am not, one of those 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, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... to our 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 ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... 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 ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... the Continent, and gather materials in Italy or Switzerland for a new travel book. But before carrying out this project, he would woo fortune once again, and in a different form. During the months of October and November, 1843, in the intervals of "Chuzzlewit," he wrote a short story that has taken its place, by almost universal consent, among his masterpieces, nay, among the masterpieces of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 sent me ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... 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 ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... in Homespun,' is sure to be found a literary treat by the reading public. His stories have that polished finish which is so difficult to attain, and which makes the short story a ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... 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
... 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
... 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 of eminent discernment. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... by his father's cough. After a bad fit, he was very weary and restless. Now, in such a condition, Cosmo could almost always put him to sleep by reading to him, and he therefore got a short story, and began to read. At first it had the desired effect, but in a little while he woke, and asked him to go on. The story was of a king's ship so disguising herself that a pirate took her for a merchant-man; and Cosmo, to whom it naturally recalled ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... "in a German paper I read a short story about a tame crippled crane that lived in the park of some small town. I forget what happened in the story, but there was one line that I shall always remember: 'it was lame, that ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki |
