short-stories

The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a __oundless music_. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

The sultan had enormous eyebrows, fibrous like angora wool. In moments of strife, his eyebrows twitched violently. Like now!His Excellency__ royal blood boiled. Once again another mesmerized American news anchor gushed about Dubai__ vision, hailing the imagination of the al-Maktoum family.__here is this vision coming from?_ probed Katie Couric.__gnorant Yankee!_ Sultan Mo-Mo__ British twang bore traces of Basil Fawlty.The sultan wanted to retch. Dubai__ showboating gave him indigestion, but he continued helping himself to more chips and fiery salsa, downing cold Guinness, smoking excellent hash, humming the theme song of The Wonder Years.

There__ an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don__ notice at what point that you__e actually overwhelmed by this. There__ no showiness, at all. It__ the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn__ have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

I__ always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo__eople smiled plastic smiles, told one__pmanship stories with phony self__eprecation, then half__istened with painted__n sincerity to the one__pmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo__eople laboring in the vineyards of pseudo__ntellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self__ggrandizement.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

Oh no, princess. I would never carry out anything which could harm your being. This was just something I was told to say. I'm not sure what is planned, if, you go against their wishes. But, I'm sure you're smart and won't test them.

This daemon loves men whose marriage beds have grown cold, so she can set them ablaze.

You're never too old to laugh at stories about love and sex.

Lipstick never lasted long when they were together; he would always kiss her after she had applied it, as if he liked the smearing viscous sensation. Sometimes she felt sure it was discomposing her that he enjoyed.

When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.

Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.

With more time spent in their mother's presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie's own facile mental questioning and creative drive, paired with her physical rigidity, all the more oppositional, and, how they dance around serious subjects, laughable.

Sometimes I help him out and sometimes he helps me out, and sometimes he tries to push me through the wall. (Dark City Lights)

I'd started calling my parents but only when I knew they wouldn't be home.

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills.

One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.