Ernest Hemingway
I want nothing. I just want the emptiness to mean something. — Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories (Scribner, 1987) Advertisements
Category: Short Stories
Edgar Allan Poe
There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the Heavens, yet everything had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumberable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tullips with wings. ― Edgar Allan Poe, from “The Island of the Fay,” The Fall… Continue reading Edgar Allan Poe
Simon van Booy
We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river — we could feel the weight of each other’s stones. — Simon van Booy, from “Conception,” The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories. (Turtle Point Press; First Edition edition, May 1, 2007)
Vladimir Nabokov
–and it seemed to him that happiness itself had that smell, the smell of dead leaves. — , from “The Return of Chorb,” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
Virginia Woolf
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
Sherwood Anderson
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that. ― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio. (Oxford University Press; World’s Classics edition, November 11, 1999)
Jorge Luis Borges
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist. — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. (New… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
