In all my years of writing, this is what I’ve been told about short stories: They are about one thing, they are less complex than novels, and they are more of a precursor than a respected medium.
"The human mind is hardwired to see patterns and connections where they otherwise would not exist. Faces are one of the images that our mind most automatically construes out of irrelevant and nondescript objects, so much so that two dashes and a curve or a parking meter can easily resemble a smiley face."
"If I were in the stands, I would see the smoke rising from the barrel of the gun, well before we will hear it go off from the starting blocks. The speed of light travels close to three hundred million meters per second faster than the speed of sound. Silence is what we’re left with."
"I looked for stories that felt close enough to claim as mine, yet distant enough to claim as “fiction.” My grandparents, Guka in particular, served as entry into a world I didn’t feel I had access to—a world of painfully real people with proper, lived lives."
"Nabokov creates quite a web for his readers, meant to at once ensnare them through Humbert’s beckoning, but also by revealing the web itself through his aesthetic manipulation of language as a medium." An essay on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Lolita.