Great American Short Stories Quotes

“The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Well, you’ve got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds. You look as if you’d been insulted whenever you’re thrown with any except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I’m cut in on every few feet—and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. No girl can afford to neglect them. They’re the big part of any crowd. Young boys too shy to talk are the very best conversational practice. Clumsy boys are the best dancing practice. If you can follow them and yet look graceful you can follow a baby tank across a barb-wire sky-scraper.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Don’t you think I know how to dress myself?” “No,” murmured Marjorie less than half-aloud. “What?” “I didn’t hint anything,” said Marjorie succinctly. “I said, as I remember, that it was better to wear a becoming dress three times straight than to alternate it with two frights.” “Do you think that was a very nice thing to say?” “I wasn’t trying to be nice.” Then after a pause: “When do you want to go?” Bernice drew in her breath sharply. “Oh!” It was a little half-cry. Marjorie looked up in surprise. “Didn’t you say you were going?” “Yes, but——” “Oh, you were only bluffing!” They stared at each other across the breakfast-table for a moment. Misty waves were passing before Bernice’s eyes, while Marjorie’s face wore that rather hard expression that she used when slightly intoxicated undergraduates were making love to her.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth,” he began quietly. This was a remark that he sometimes made to girls at college proms when they were talking in just such half-dark as this. Bernice distinctly jumped. She turned an ungraceful red and became clumsy with her fan. No one had ever made such a remark to her before. “Fresh!”—the word had slipped out before she realized it, and she bit her lip.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“like most boys, he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul’s, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul’s fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant things.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; their red glory over.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, “dress the part.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air was deliciously soft and fragrant.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant things.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep,—and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life;”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The tickets had probably been sent her out of kindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about as much right to sit there as he had.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers’ Chorus from Faust, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of his teachers were not there to witness his lightheartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. There is something wrong about the fellow.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“In one way and another, he had made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous intent.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“IT WAS Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanours.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“hauteur”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“how eagerly and joyously he had found his lost mate.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“O Phoebe!” he called. “O Phoebe! Oh, no, don’t leave me!” And feeling the lure of a world where love was young and Phoebe as this vision presented her, a delightful epitome of their quondam youth, he gave a gay cry of “Oh, wait, Phoebe!” and leaped.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more