Short Fiction quotes

But the welding of the iron would go on, and the man who gave his easy money for it would fancy he had paid for it, not seeing the stiff figures in their graves, nor the crippled beggar, nor the broken homes.

The rocket of iron is already cold; dull, inert, fireless, the black fragments lie upon the floor whereon they lately rained their red revenge.

Do with them what you will, you cannot undo their work. The men are clearing way. Only he with the white face does not go back to his place.

perhaps some mightier burden. For one instant the shapely, boyish figure was in full light, then it vanished away in the engulfing mist—the mist which the vision of him had made me forget.

For I knew I had seen a Man of Iron, into whose soul the iron had driven, whose nerves were tempered as cold steel, but behind whose still, impassive features slumbered a white-hot heart.

And others should see a rocket and a ruin, and feel the Vengeance of Beaten Iron, before the mist comes and swallows all.

No, you have never felt it?

But you have never heard the Chain Gang sing!

Their faces were black and brutal and hopeless; their brows were low, their jaws were heavy, their eyes were hard;

All around the sweep and the glory of shimmering ether, sun, sun, a world of sun, and these still calling for light! Sun for the road, sun for the stones, sun for the red clay—and no light for this dark living clay?

Only heat that burns and blaze that blinds, but does not lift the darkness!

“And lead me to that Lamp—”

The pathetic prayer for light went trembling away out into the luminous gulf of day, and the axes swung and fell; and the grim dry face of the man with the gun looked on with its frozen smile.

“So long as they sing, they work,” said the smile, still and ironical.

“A friend to them that’s got no friend”—Man of Sorrows, lifted up upon Golgotha, in the day when the forces of the Law and the might of Social Order set you there, in the moment of your pain and desperate accusation against Heaven, when that …

Some women are born to love stories as the sparks fly upward.

You see it every time they glance at you, and you feel it every time they lay a finger on your sleeve.

So if it was justice to Effie, what is it to that other woman?

In truth, justice had nothing to do with it; she loved the wrong man, that was all; and married or unmarried, it would have been the same, for a formula doesn’t make a man, nor the lack of it unmake him.

The fellow was superior in intellect. It is honesty only which can wring so much from those who knew them both, for as to any other thing she sat as high over him as the stars are. Not that he was an actively bad man;

At the next buzz in the room they two were left alone. She looked at him once as she said, “What do you think the people will do about it?”

He glanced at the crowd with a thin smile: “Do? Talk.”

In a little time he said quietly: “It does you no good here. I will take you home and come back for David afterward.” She had no idea of contradicting him; so they went out together.

I have sinned: and I am rewarded according to my sin, which was great.

There is no forgiveness for me; let no man think there is forgiveness for sin: the gods cannot forgive.

I have sinned: and I am rewarded according to my sin, which was great.

There is no forgiveness for me; let no man think there is forgiveness for sin: the gods cannot forgive.

This was my sin, and this is my punishment, that I forsook my god to follow a stranger—only a while, a very brief, brief while—and when I would have returned there was no more returning. I cannot worship any more—that is my punishment;

the chiseled lip and chin whereover runs the radiance of life in bubbling gleams, the cup of living wine was never mine to taste or kiss.

I am earth-colored, and for my own ugliness sit in the shadow, that the sunlight may not see me, nor the beloved of my god.

But, once, in my hidden corner, behind the curtain of shadows, I blinked at the glory of the world, and had such joy of it as only the ugly know, sitting silent and worshiping, forgetting themselves and forgotten.

They were here always in my wonder-house, my house of Beauty, the temple of my god. I shut the door on common life and worshiped here.

And no bright, living, flying thing, in whose body Beauty dwells as guest, can guess the ecstatic joy of a brown, silent creature, a toad-thing, squatting on the shadowed ground, self-blotted, motionless, thrilling with the presence of All-Beauty, though it has no part therein.

But the gods are many. And once a strange god came to me. Sharp upon the shadowy ground he stood, and beckoned me with knotted fingers. There was no beauty in his lean figure and sunken cheeks;

but the word of a woman bent with service, seamed with labor, haggard with watching; the word of a woman who, at the washtub, had kept her sufferer by the work of her hands, and watched him between the snatches of her sleep.

The immemorial passion of a common heart, that is not much, that had not much, and has lost all.

Years were in it. For years she had had her burden to carry; and she had carried it to the edge of the grave. There it had fallen from her, and her arms were empty. Nothing to do any more. Alone.

Years were in it. For years she had had her burden to carry; and she had carried it to the edge of the grave. There it had fallen from her, and her arms were empty.

Nothing to do any more. Alone.

She sat up suddenly with a momentary flare of light in her face.—“As long as I had him,” she said, “I could do. I thought I’d be glad when he was gone, a many and many a time.

but they could never, never have the chance. They must always do something else, always a hundred other things first, always save and spare and patch and contrive; there was never time to do the thing she longed for most.

Only the odd moments, the unexpected freedoms, the stolen half-hours, in which to live one’s highest dream, only the castaway time for one’s soul!

And every year the fleeting glory waned, wavered, sunk away more and more sorrowfully into the gray, soundless shadows of an unlived life.

of the voices she would have given to the messages of the masters, and never would give now; and with a bitter compression of the lips she said: “

Well, I was born to strive and fail.

”

And as they all had died, she too would die, slave of the triple Terror, sacrificing the highest to the meanest, that somewhere in some lighted ballroom or gas-bright theater, some piece of vacant flesh might wear one more jewel in her painted hair.

“My soul,” she said bitterly, “my soul for their diamonds!”

It was time to sleep, for tomorrow—work.

But I have not received.

Over me there sits that pitiless tyrant, the Soul; and I am nothing.

It has driven me to the city, where the air is fever and fire, and said, “Breathe this;—I would learn; I cannot learn in the empty fields; temples are here—stay.”

“

We never long for the thing we are rich in,

” she answered in a dry, changed voice. Nevertheless his face lighted, it was pleasant to be rich in the thing she worshiped. He had gradually drawn near her feet and now suddenly bent forward and kissed them passionately.

“As like as ants.

People are vessels which life fills and breaks, as it does trees and bees and other sorts of vessels.

They play when they are little, and then they love and then they have children and then they die. Ants do the same.”

The conductor had stepped on it and crushed it open; and there lay the marvelous creamy leaves, curled at their edges like kiss-seeking lips, each with its glory greater than Solomon’s, all fouled and ruined in the human reek.

And I dared not save the others! Miserable coward!

I forced my hands tighter in my pockets and turned my head away towards the outside night and the backward slipping street. Between me and it, a dim reflection wavered, the image of the thing that stood there before me;

Can’t you see that the necessity of an employer is forced upon him by his lack of ability to command the means of production? He cannot employ himself, therefore he must sell his labor at a disadvantage to him who controls the land and capital.

Hence he is not free to compete with his employer any more than a prisoner is free to compete with his jailer for fresh air.

Well, I admit that much. Certainly the employee cannot compete with his employer.

But what is equality? Does equality mean that I shall enjoy what you have produced? By no means.

Equality simply means the freedom of every individual to develop all his being, without hindrance from another, be he stronger or weaker.

What! You will have the weak person suffer because he is weak? He may need as much, or more, than a strong one, but if he is not able to produce it what becomes of his equality?

My act you call charity, our act is not charity. If one person does a kind act you stigmatize it; if one plus one, summed up and called a commune, does the same thing, you laud it.

By some species of alchemy akin to the transmutation of metals, the arsenic of charity becomes the gold of justice!

Strange calculation! Can you not see that you are running from a bugaboo again? You change the name, but the character of an action is not altered by the number of people participating in it.

By some species of alchemy akin to the transmutation of metals, the arsenic of charity becomes the gold of justice! Strange calculation! Can you not see that you are running from a bugaboo again?

You change the name, but the character of an action is not altered by the number of people participating in it.

But it is not the same action. For me to assist you out of pity is the charity of superior possession to the inferior. But to base society upon the principle:

Why, will you hate a man because he has finer eyes or better health than you? Do you want to demolish a person’s manuscript because he excels you in penmanship?

Would you cut the extra length from Samson’s hair, and divide it around equally among all short-haired people?

Will you share a slice from the poet’s genius and put it in the common storehouse so everybody can go and take some?

“Why? Because it would be a crash that would make the people think.

They do not think, they are asleep. Their bodies work, but their brains have never yet awakened.

Another czar would come, and he, too, would have to be killed, until the people learn that it not to trade masters, but to have no masters they must work.”

“there is tyranny in America, but it is nothing to Russia. The nihilists are not people who love fighting and killing; but it is the only thing left them. We are not allowed to read, or write, or print, or agitate.

We must keep our ideas until we choke with them, even if we wade in misery to the eyes.

For trying to help, the noblest and the best have been sent to Siberia. We must kill.”

“But what good will it do for you to go off alone?” I said; “You certainly have beautiful ideals, but if you isolate yourself, how will it help humanity?” He snapped his fingers. “Always that,” he answered; “

I reform myself; that is the beginning of reform, self.

When I have accomplished it perhaps I shall return and teach others.” He glided around the room and added, “Yes, anyway I shall come back some day. The Americans are a lot of cowards, but some day they will talk justice, too.