The Best American Short Stories 2014 Quotes

“A dog’s love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one’s ability to hold that one’s interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion—from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I’m always happy to leave, and I’m always happy to come back.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don’t think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“We -- editors, writers, teachers, publishers -- need to do whatever we can to enliven readers, to help create communities for them if we want to continue to have readers at all. Our independent bookstores are the front lines, and many booksellers are fighting the good fight. Here, books stimulate conversation. Conversation stimulates a sense of community. Listening happens. Thinking. The exchange of thoughts.”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become -- or are we already -- a nation of performers with no audience?”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“STEPHEN O’CONNOR Next to Nothing”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“CRAIG DAVIDSON Medium Tough”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything anymore, maybe I’ll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can’t seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“But we all know the drill: if we eat only candy, if we cultivate our friendships and relationships primarily online, if we forget to walk to town sometimes instead of drive, a crucial part of us will wither. You don’t have to read all the books on your list at once. Just pick up the one that grabs you right now. If you don’t love it, put it down. Move on.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“In the Food-Star parking lot, a young blond woman asks Ivy if she has been saved. “What are you talking about?” says Ivy. “Saved!” The young woman’s smile brightens distinctly. “You know,” she says, “have you found Jesus?” “There’s no point in talking to me,” says Ivy. When the young woman only blinks and ups her smile volume, Ivy says, “I don’t believe in God.” “Why not?” “Because I know that I am entirely insignificant, doomed to complete extinction, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“The river runs wide and passive in sunlit stretches, then fast and bawdy with whitewater rapids.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“The sky above the buildings outside their apartment windows is the color of a dusty chalkboard, and the light coming down onto the street is exactly the color of boredom.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“there are so many things that can take a person somewhere else, but none of those things ever happened to me,”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“The sound of the wind against the sides of the house is exactly like the sound of wolf fur against cardboard.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“At the end of an evening, her women friends would hug her, or a friend’s husband might slip his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too suggestively, and the coldness in her would respond, I don’t give a damn if I ever see any of you again.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn’t work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Best American Short Stories 2014