David Miller

Tell me what you want, and I shall tell you who you are.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

The short story can be the most surprising form of fiction because it offers a magnitude of tellings.

One story included here was published originally on Twitter, which shows what you can do with as few words as you wish – FOR SALE: BABY’S SHOES. NEVER WORN.1

Pritchett said, “Yes. People don’t know what’s going to happen next in their lives, so we don’t either.”

“To be an artist,” she observed, “includes much; one must possess many gifts – absolute gifts – which have not been acquired by one’s own efforts. And moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul.”

Everything that surrounds us, everything that we see without looking at it, everything that we touch without knowing it, everything that we handle without feeling it, everything that we meet without clearly distinguishing it, has a rapid, surprising, and inexplicable effect upon us and upon our organs, and through them on our ideas and on our being itself.

Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and invincible; the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.

“She breathes and burns as if with a great fire. She speaks not; she hears not – and burns!”

And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.