O Henry Stories Quotes & Sayings

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her. — Kathleen Tessaro

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. — Henry Louis Gates

Every object tells a story if you know how to read it. — Henry Ford

An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish threw water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true. — Matthew Neill Null

There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands. — O. Henry

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. — O. Henry

He'll come around. He's just shy." "Maybe I should lie down on a table in the workroom and wait to see if he welds something to me." "I think that's the way most great love stories begin."
Bardugo, Leigh (2012-06-05). Shadow and Bone (The Grisha) (p. 190). Henry Holt and Co. (BYR). Kindle Edition. — Leigh Bardugo

A short story is simplification to the highest degree — Henry Seidel Canby

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. — Henry Louis Gates

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature. — O. Henry

Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us. — Patti Callahan Henry

Stories are always braided together - one affecting the other. — Patti Callahan Henry

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2. — O. Henry

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James) — Herbert A. Wise

When you put yourself in environments that continually test you, that's where all the good stories come from. That's where the jokes come from is from the shitty parts. — Henry Rollins

Whatever's happening today, remember it is only ONE SCENE in a long movie. Don't treat it like it's the whole story. Keep writing the story. — Henry Cloud

Henry read it and said, "A story has to have three things. They are a beginning, a middle and an end. They don't have to be in that order. You can start a story at the end or end it in the middle. There are no rules on that except where you, the author, decide to put all three parts. Your story has a beginning and an end. But it's good. Go put in a middle and bring it back to me."
I went away encouraged, rewrote the story and returned it to him two days later. Again he looked it over and said, "It's a good story but it lacks a bullet-between-the-eyes opening. Your stories should always have a knock-'em-dead opening." Then, looking with exaggerated suspicion around the crime-prone denizens of the room with an exaggerated suspicion, he said loudly, "I don't mean that literally. — John William Tuohy

The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called the happy accidents of language. — Steve Almond

When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media. — Henry Jenkins

The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practised on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practised dreamer slips into like a bone slips into its sockets — Henry Miller

He just . . . Nick just wanted to be special. He wanted to be Luke, with a destiny. He wanted to be Frodo, with a quest. He wanted to be an unlikely hero and do something that mattered, but there are no quests in the real world, where everything is much bigger and more tangled and complex than in the stories he loves. In the real world, small people don't get to be heroes, and Nick is the smallest person he knows. — Lisa Henry

Brin tilted his head. 'For a moment I thought you were a dirty little tramp like the rest of us, but then you go and ruin it. For future reference, stories about anonymous hookups in alleys should not end up with you going to the library alone.'
'I had a paper due.'
Brin burst out laughing and hugged him. 'You're too adorable for words.' — Lisa Henry

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

Originally the structure was ... a modern narrator who would appear intermittently and talk about his memories of his grandmother, which would then be juxtaposed against scenes from the past. But the stories from the past were always more interesting that the things in the present. I find this almost endemic to modern plays that veer between past and present ... So as we've gone on developing GOLDEN CHILD, the scenes from the past have become more dominant, and all that remains of the present are these two little bookends that frame the action. — David Henry Hwang

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way . — Henry David Thoreau

The first story I wrote was "Catface" which was later selected for The O. Henry Collection, so that gave me some confidence to try some more. Gathering these stories together was fun, but I realized when I read them that I have certain mental preoccupations and they keep recurring in my stories. — Arthur Bradford

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen - the census taker - and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million. — O. Henry

Reading fiction - excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers - has been shown to enhance theory of mind: — Margaret Heffernan

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it. — O. Henry

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books. — Molly Antopol

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster ... I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story. — O. Henry

My way of telling stories is kind of what I do naturally. It's no different from how I would talk to you if you were in my living room. — Henry Cho

I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories. — Henry Rollins

There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor's dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the pressgangs of Europe. — Richard Henry Dana Jr.

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. — Henry Louis Gates

Patti Callahan Henry seamlessly combines mystery, family love, and personal journey all in one engrossing tale. From the intriguing beginning to the touching ending, The Stories We Tell is filled with the warmth, heart and compassion that have become the trademark of her novels. — Diane Chamberlain

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better. — Henry James

The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future. — Henry Giroux

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.) — Samuel Beckett

There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations. — Henry Cavill

All of women's stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you've made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that's successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient ... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature — Henry Seidel Canby

They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,
how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long. — Henry David Thoreau

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public. — O. Henry

Since the last tour I have done a lot of extensive travel to Iraq, Kuwait, Siberia, South Korea and other places and picked up some hopefully interesting stories. We are living in interesting times and as bad as things are, I draw considerable inspiration from some of the things I'm seeing and people I'm meeting. I'm looking forward to getting out on the road and talking about it all. — Henry Rollins

Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn't worth the time and effort. — Henry Rollins

THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry - lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness - plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night. — Joshilyn Jackson

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form — Henry James

I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences. — Susan Hill

But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever. — Thomas Pynchon

It's hard enough to tell good stories about people who analyze information for a living. It's even harder to do a good show about people who think for a living. — Henry Bromell

Patti Callahan Henry's THE STORIES WE TELL is a lyrical exploration of love and longing, secrets and suspicion, family and friendship, all told with the author's trademark insights into the hollows and curves of the heart and mind of a working woman who must balance the demands of motherhood, wifedom, sisterhood, and yes, the deepest cravings for artistic expression. I always love the stories PCH tells! — Mary Kay Andrews