Brian

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”
― Clark Zlotchew, Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe