Short Story Writers From The United States

"Our conversations have not been such that I am anxious to continue them in private."

"I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost.What else is there?" She suddenly moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: "Can I buy you with my body?"

"Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their ends while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth."

"His features were small, in keeping with his stature, and regular. His skin was very fair. The whiteness of his cheeks was as little blurred by any considerable growth of beard as by the glow of blood. His clothing was neither new nor of more than ordinary quality, but it, and his manner of wearing it was marked by a hard masculine neatness."

"She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made."

"Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-from high flat temples-in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

"The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two."

"She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her."

"That’s why I don’t very often drink, or even smoke. I want to try cocaine, though because that’s suppose to sharpen the brain, isn’t it?"

"How do you feel?" "Terrible. I must have gone to bed sober."

"A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It’s not easy once you’re out of the habit."

"You got types?" "Only you, darling-lanky brunettes with wicked jaws."

""Tall-over six feet-and one of the thinnest men I’ve ever seen. He must be about fifty now and his hair was almost white when I knew him.Usually needs a haircut, ragged brindle mustache, bites his fingernails." I pushed the dog away to reach for my drink."

"Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly everything, and that courage isn't a damn thing but a habit of not dodging things because you're afraid of them?"

""Remember, I've got no idea what this is all about," said the girl when they were in the living room, a narrow room, where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple."

"Stop, you idiot!" I bawled at her. Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of gray flannel shaping itself to the calf of each gray wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped forward. Sweat greased the gun in my hand. When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat. "Adieu!" she said softly.And I put a bullet in the calf of her leg. She sat down--plump! Utter surprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain. I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it. "You ought to have known I'd do it!" My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger's in my ears. "Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?"

"But where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed, honesty not infrequently prevails."

"I didn't know then, and I don't know now, whether she was the owner of the world's best poker face or was just naturally stupid, but whichever she was, she was thoroughly and completely it."

"All successful bunko men come in time to believe the world, except for themselves, is populated with a race of human sheep who may be trusted to conduct themselves with true sheeplike docility."

"Emotions are useless during business hours."

"I don't like eloquence. If it isn't effective enough to pierce your hide, it's tiresome, and if it is effective enough, it muddles your thoughts."

"If a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later."

"It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."

"The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines ... human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse."

"Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?"

"People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own."

"By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations."

"Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong."

"He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people."

"There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)"

"I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?"

"I said, I want to tell you something She said, you can tell me tomorrow I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you. Grandma."

"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. (p. 309)"

"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

"I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. (p. 280)"

"It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (p. 279)"

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you. (p. 224)"

"I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything. (p. 216)"

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss. (p. 208)"

"I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? "My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me."

"She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore. (p. 189)"

"I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want."

"There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything. (p. 175)"

"Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."

"So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go! (p. 153)"

"I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)"

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet. (p. 130)"

"Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. (p. 113)"

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. (p. 99)"