According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now Air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd Bat, With short shrill Shriek flits by on leathern Wing,... Or where the Beetle winds His small but sullen Horn,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children ... seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives..., humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How else is the famous short story 'A study in Abjection' to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently... undermined by psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work--the only thing, af...ter all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport:... Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount... of hard work is too severe for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is our life? a play of passion; Our mirth the music of division;... Our mothers' wombs the tiring-houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,... And speed glum heroes up the line to death,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think a surgeon is particularly suited by temperament to the short story form as opposed to the novel, because the short story i...s rather like a surgical operation. It has a beginning, middle, and an end--at least my stories all do: you make an incision, you rummage around inside for a little while, then you stitch it up. Writing a short story is like taking out an inflamed appendix.... The act of making an incision is the creation of a wound for the purpose of healing the patient. The earliest forms of writing were exactly that: taking up a sharp rock and gouging out hieroglyphics in a flat stone--making wounds, as it were, to tell a story. The difference, of course, is that the surgical wound must heal, eventually, but the writer's wound does not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »