The Best American Short Stories 2019 Quotes

“I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“The breach between us is so wide that by the war’s end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“I sat with my father, Leo, at the kitchen table and got drunk with him for the first time. He told me to beware of crazy women, angry women, passionate women. He told me they would ruin me. “But they are also the best women,” he said, “the best lovers, with a jungle between their legs and such wildness in bed that every man should experience.”
― Jamel Brinkley, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“animal love, the love of an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and realizes that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935–1978)”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“It’s not your fault, he said. And I’m not defending her for what she did. But I believe any story that anybody tells me. You can’t be to blame if you got faith in people.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“husband, a certain thought ringing like a bell calling”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“but one of the dying’s imperatives is to make the living see them. This is nobody’s fault, but it is everybody’s burden.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“If we don't talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.”
― Kathleen Alcott, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“If we don’t talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“But now, summer was at its height, offering its sweetest fruits, full of furry fairies and glowing bugs. Alex leaned against me, humming with warm blood, his brain like a different universe.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“He’d say almost anything he could think of to make them stay, to keep the party going as long as possible, to get a smile to flash across one of their faces.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“Anything can be lived around, so long as it’s only you who has to do it.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“I needed to be reminded, when I caught myself deep in a years-old argument with my husband, alone and furious on the mostly empty midday subway, that he had been real—that my unhappiness was not only some chemical dysfunction of mine.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“the doctor recognizes himself in the bear’s awareness, a nameless silhouette in the landscape, cleansed of every accusation;”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“The bereaved must understand that should they cross paths with a vukodlak, this shell is not their beloved. Only the flesh has been reanimated; the soul, it is presumed, is safe with God.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“To survive here required one to sip the air; the wide sky belonged to the nobles.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019

“what I really wanted to do was write a story that was all backstory, in which multiple protagonists, none of whom are exactly likable, wake up, tell lots of different stories inside the story, argue significant moral points, then wake up a second time and realize the whole thing was a dream.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories 2019