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There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Mavis Gallant

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Mavis Gallant
Age: 91 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 11
Died: 2014
Died: February 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Short Story Writer
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Young
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant
Another
Short
Novels
Stories
Along
Occasions
Back
Novel
Shut
Book
Waiting
Wanting
Come
Reading
Meant
Many
Read
Wait
Something
Keep
Later
Chapters
Never
Else
Follow
Occasion

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I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.
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[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.
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I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
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Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.
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Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.
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... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.
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A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
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There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
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All lives are interesting no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
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A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.
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I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.
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Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?
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Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.
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She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
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No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.
Mavis Gallant