The Best American Short Stories 2013 Quotes

“no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“The World to Come”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Why is ink like a fire? Because it is a good servant and a hard master.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Philanthropy”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Train”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless. Tenderness did not enter into it, except in a damaged way.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“The Chair”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Malaria”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“I think this summer was also the period when I first struck on the idea of ambition, that I could be something in particular, rather than just myself in general.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, had quickly morphed into something fake.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“it is the self we are always looking for, or always trying to escape, and fiction provides us with both options; they are wrapped together, these flights to and from who we are. We read because we are looking to see what others are thinking, feeling, seeing; how they are acting out their frustrations, their happiness, their addictions; we see what we can learn. How do people manage marriage and loss and illness and sex and parenting? How do they do all this? Often, the emotions that fill our inner lives are too large to make sense of; chaos and irrationality jump around inside us. To enter the form of a story is to calm down, or excite ourselves, within a controlled space.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“The writer chooses details in accord with the narrative voice most fit to tell the story, sensing how much is needed and what might need to be cut.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“In the best stories that sense comes through: it is what it is.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“What seems a loss of interest is in fact a failure of trust, of shared intimacy.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“It is a literary truism that there must be a period of distillation before the real impact of some tremendous event, either historical or personal, can emerge in writing.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Driving, Lambright thought the moon looked like a fingerprint of chalk.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Best American Short Stories 2013