100 Great Short Stories Quotes

“Nothing in Mr. Waterby’s whole experience as a married man had so wrenched his sensibilities and disturbed his faith as Mrs. Waterby’s objection to the purchase of the set of Poe. There was but one way to account for it. She wanted all the money for herself, or else she wanted him to put it into the bank so that she could come into it after he—but this was too monstrous. However, Mrs. Waterby’s conduct helped to give strength to Mr. Waterby’s meanest suspicions. Two or three days after the first conversation she asked: “You didn’t buy that set of Poe, did you, Alfred?” “No, I didn’t buy it,” he answered, as coldly and with as much hauteur as possible. He hoped to hear her say: “Well, why don’t you go and get it? I’m sure that you want it, and I’d like to see you buy something for yourself once in a while.” That would have shown the spirit of a loving and unselfish wife. But she merely said, “That’s right; don’t buy it,” and he was utterly unhappy, for he realized that he had married a woman who did not love him and who simply desired to use him as a pack-horse for all household burdens. As soon as Mr. Waterby”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouth-pieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield. I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!” I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue lines of wandering hills.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“riding with flashing pedals into God’s green world—hurray!—”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“A young man sat in the saddle, a youth, a careless youth on a tour. He himself, great heavens, surely made no pretensions to belonging to the great and glorious one of the world! He rode a machine of middling quality—it does not really matter of what make—a wheel costing, say, about two hundred marks. And with this he went pedalling a bit through the country, fresh from the city, riding with flashing pedals into God’s green world—hurray! He wore a coloured shirt and a grey jacket, sports leggings, and the jauntiest little cap in the world—a very joke of a cap, with brown checks and a button on the top. And from under this cap a thick mop of blond hair welled forth and stood up above his forehead. His eyes were of a lightning-blue. He came on like Life itself and tinkled his bell, but Piepsam did not move a hair’s breadth out of the way. He stood there and looked at Life with a rigid stare.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“For you must know that ill fortune slays the dignity of a man—it is just as well to have a little insight into these things. There is a strange and dreadful concatenation of cause and effect here. There is no use in a man’s protesting his own innocence; in most cases he will despise himself for his misfortune. But self-contempt and vice have a strange and horrible interrelationship; they feed each other, they play into each other’s hands, in a way to make one’s blood run cold. And that is the way it was with Piepsam. He drank because he did not respect himself, and he respected himself less and less because the continual shameful defeats of all his good resolutions devoured all his self-confidence.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life—it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“In a man of forty I saw a boy of twelve; and this too without the slightest abatement of my respect. Because all was so honest and natural, every expression and attitude so graceful with genuine good-nature, that the marvelous juvenility of Hautboy assumed a sort of divine and immortal air, like that of some forever youthful god of Greece.”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“she was glad to see her, and offered to salute her, which Mrs. Veal complied with, till their lips almost touched, and then Mrs. Veal drew her hand across her own eyes, and said, “I am not very well,” and so waived”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“climbed”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“of”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories

“upon”
― James Daley, 100 Great Short Stories