英语短文故事精选汇总

英语短文故事精选汇总
英语是世界上通用的语言,而英语的学习是很枯燥的,想要学好英语不妨先从阅读英语故事开始。

从英文故事中学习,提高英文水平。

下面小编给大家介绍关于英语短文故事，方便大家学习。

英语短文故事1
31 Three Days to See
Helen Keller
All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live.
Sometimes it was as long as a year; sometimes as short as twenty-four hours, but always we were interested in discovering just how the doomed man chose to spend his last days or his last hours.
I speak, of course, of free men who have a choice, not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.
Such stories set up thinking, wondering what we should do under similar circumstances. What associations should we crowd into those last hours as mortal beings? What happiness should we find in reviewing the past, what regrets?
Sometimes I have thought it would be an excellent rule to live each day as if we should die tomorrow.
Such an attitude would emphasize sharply the values of life. We should live each day with a gentleness, a vigor, and a keenness of appreciation which are often lost when time stretches before us in the constant panorama of more days and months and years to come.
There are those, of course, who would adopt the epicurean motto of “Eat, drink, and be merry,” most people would be
chastened by the certainty of impending death.
Most of us take life for granted. We know that one day we must die, but usually we picture that day as far in the future, when we are in buoyant health, death is all but unimaginable.
We seldom think of it. The days stretch out in an endless vista. So we go about our petty task, hardly aware of our listless attitude towards life.
The same lethargy, I am afraid, characterizes the use of our faculties and senses.
Only the deaf appreciate hearing, only the blind realize the manifold blessings that lie in sight.
Particularly does this observation apply to those who have lost sight and hearing in adult life.
But those who have never suffered impairment of sight or hearing seldom make the fullest use of these blessed faculties.
Their eyes and ears take in all sights and sound hazily, without concentration, and with little appreciation.
It is the same old story of not being grateful for what we conscious of health until we are ill.
I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.
Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see.
Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed.
“Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for
long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.
How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note?
I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch.
I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough shaggy bark of a pine.
In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter’s sleep I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me. Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently in a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song. I am delighted to have cool waters of a brook rush through my open fingers.
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
To me the pageant of seasons is a thrilling and unending drama, the action of which streams through my finger tips.
At times my heart cries out with longing to see all these things. If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch, how much more beauty must be revealed by sight.
Yet, those who have eyes apparently see little. The panorama of color and action fill the world is taken for granted.
It is human, perhaps, to appreciate little that which we have and to long for that which we have not, but it is a great pity that in the world of light and the gift of sight is used only as mere convenience rather that as a means of adding fullness to life.
Oh, the things that I should see if I had the power of sight
for three days!
英语短文故事2
Run, Patti, Run!
Mark V. Hansen
At a young and tender age, Patti Wilson was told by her doctor that she was an epileptic. Her father, Jim Wilson, is a morning jogger. One day she smiled through her braces and said, "Daddy what I'd really love to do is running with you every day, but I'm afraid I'll have a seizure." Her father told her, "If you do, I know how to handle it, so let's start running!"
That's just what they did every day. It was a wonderful experience for them to share and there were no seizures at all while she was running. After a few weeks, she told her father, "Daddy, what I'd really love to do is break the world's long-distance running record for women."
Her father checked the Guiness Book of World Records and found that the farthest any woman had run was 80 miles. As a freshman in high school, Patti announced, "I'm going to run from Orange County up to San Francisco." (A distance of 400 miles.) "As a sophomore," she went on, "I'm going to run to Portland, Oregon." (Over 1500 miles.) "As a junior I'll run to St. Louis." (About 2000 miles) "As a senior I'll run to the White House." (More than 3000 miles away.) In view of her handicap, Patti was as ambitious as she was enthusiastic, but she said she looked at the handicap of being an epileptic as simply "an inconvenience." She focused not on what she had lost, but on what she had left.
That year, she completed her run to San Francisco wearing a T-shirt that read, "I Love Epileptics." Her dad ran every mile at her side, and her mom, a nurse, followed in a motor home behind them in case anything went wrong. In her sophomore year, Patti's
classmates got behind her. They built a giant poster that read, "Run, Patti, Run!" (This has since become her motto and the title of a book she has written.) On her second marathon, en route to Portland, she fractured a bone in her foot. A doctor told her she had to stop her run. He said, "I've got to put a cast on your ankle so that you don't sustain permanent damage."
"Doc, you don't understand," she said. "This isn't just a whim of mine, it's a magnificent obsession! I'm not just doing it for me, I'm doing it to break the chains on the brains that limit so many others. Isn't there a way I can keep running?" He gave her one option. He could wrap it in adhesive instead of putting it in a cast. He warned her that it would be incredibly painful, and he told her, "It will blister." She told the doctor to wrap it up. She finished the run to Portland, completing her last mile with the governor of Oregon. You may have seen the headlines: "Super Runner, Patti Wilson Ends Marathon For Epilepsy On Her 17th Birthday."
After four months of almost continuous running from West Coast to the East Coast, Patti arrived in Washington and shook the hand of the President of United States. She told him, "I wanted people to know that epileptics are normal human beings with normal lives."
I told this story at one of my seminars not long ago, and afterward a big teary-eyed man came up to me, stuck out his big meaty hand and said, "Mark, my name is Jim Wilson. You were talking about my daughter, Patti." Because of her noble efforts, he told me, enough money had been raised to open up 19 multi-million-dollar epileptic centers around the country.
If Patti Wilson can do so much with so little, what can you do to outperform yourself in a state of total wellness?
英语短文故事3
I was now five, and still I showed no real sign of intelligence.
I showed no apparent interest in things except with my toes –more especially those of my left foot. Although my natural habits were clean I could not aid myself, but in this respect my father took care of me. I used to lie on my back all the time in the kitchen or, on bright warm sunny days, out in the garden, a little bundle of crooked muscle and twisted nerves, surrounded by a family that loved me and hoped for me and that made me part of their own warmth and humanity. I was lonely, imprisoned in a world of my own, unable to communicate with others, cut off, separated from them as though a glass wall stood between my existence and theirs, thrusting me beyond the sphere of their lives and activities. I longed to run about and play with the rest, but I was unable to break loose from my bondage.
Then, suddenly, it happened! In a moment everything was changed, my future life moulded into a definite shape, my mother’s faith in me rewarded and her secret fear changed into open triumph. It happened so quickly, so simply after all the years of waiting and uncertainty that I can see and feel the whole scene as if it had happened last week. It was the afternoon of a cold, grey December day. The streets outside glistened with snow; the white sparkling flakes stuck and melted on the window-panes and hung on the boughs of the trees like molten silver. The wind howled dismally, whipping up little whirling columns of snow that rose and fell at every fresh gust. And over all, the dull, murky sky stretched like a dark canopy, a vast infinity of greyness.
Inside, all the family were gathered round the big kitchen fire that lit up the little room with a warm glow and made giant shadows dance on the walls and ceiling.
In a corner Mona and Paddy were sitting huddled together,
a few torn school primers before them. They were writing down little sums on to an old chipped slate, using a bright piece of yellow chalk. I was close to them, propped up by a pillow against the wall, watching.
It was the chalk that attracted me so much. It was a long slender stick of vivid yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and it showed up so well against the black surface of the slate that I was fascinated by it as much as if it had been a stick of gold.
Suddenly I wanted desperately to do what my sister was doing. Then –without thinking or knowing exactly what I was doing, I reached out and took the stick of chalk out of my sister’s hand – with my left foot.
I do not know why I used my left foot to do this. It is a puzzle to many people as well as to myself, for, although I had displayed a curious interest in my toes at an early age, I had never attempted before this to use either of my feet in any way. They could have been as useless to me as were my hands. That day, however, my left foot, apparently on its own volition, reached out and very impolitely took t he chalk out of my sister’s hand.
I held it tightly between my toes, and, acting on an impulse, made a wild sort of scribble with it on the slate. Next moment I stopped, a bit dazed, surprised, looking down at the stick of yellow chalk stuck between my toes, not knowing what to do with it next, hardly knowing how it got there. Then I looked and became aware that everyone had stopped talking and were staring at me silently. Nobody stirred. Mona, her black curls framing her chubby little face, stared at me with great big eyes and open mouth. Across the open hearth, his face lit by flames, sat my father, leaning forward, hands outspread on his knees, his
shoulders tense. I felt the sweat break out on my forehead.
My mother came in from the pantry with a steaming pot in her hand. She stopped midway between the table and the fire, feeling the tension flowing through the room. She followed their stare and saw me, in the corner. Her eyes looked from my face down to my foot, with the chalk gripped between my toes. She put down the pot.
The she crossed over to me and knelt down beside me, as she had done so many times before. ‘I’ll show you what to do with it, Chris,’ she said, very slowly and in a queer, jerky way, her face flushed as if with some inner excitement.
Taking another piece of chalk from Mona, she hesitated, then very deliberately drew, on the floor in front of me, the single letter ‘A’. ‘Copy that,’ she said, looking steadily at me. ‘Copy it, Christy.’ I couldn’t.
I looked about me, looked around at the faces that were turned towards me, excited faces that were at that moment frozen, immobile, eager, waiting for a miracle in their midst. The stillness was profound. The room was full of flame and shadow that danced before my eyes and lulled my taut nerves into a sort of waking sleep. I could hear the sound of the water-tap dripping in the pantry, the loud ticking of the clock on the mantelshelf, and the soft hiss and crackle of the logs on the open hearth.
I tried again. I put out my foot and made a wild jerking stab with the chalk which produced a very crooked line and nothing more. Mother held the slate steady for me. ‘Try again, Chris,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Again.’
I did. I stiffened my body and put my left foot out again, for the third time. I drew one side of the letter. I drew half the other side. Then the stick of chalk broke and I was left with a stump. I
wanted to fling it away and give up. Then I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder. I tried once more. Out went my foot. I shook, I sweated and strained every muscle. My hands were so tightly clenched that my finger nails bit into the flesh. I set my teeth so hard that I nearly pierced my lower lip. Everything in the room swam till the faces around me were mere patches of white. But – I drew it – the letter ‘A’. There it was on the floor before me. Shaky, with awkward, wobbly sides and a very uneven centre line. But it was the letter ‘A’. I looked up. I saw my mother’s face for a moment, tears on her cheeks. Then my father stooped down and hoisted me on his shoulder.
I had done it! It had started – the thing that was to give my mind its chance of expressing itself. True, I couldn’t speak with my lips, but now I would speak through something more lasting than spoken words – written words.
That one letter, scrawled on the floor with a broken bit of yellow chalk gripped between my toes, was my road to a new world, my key to mental freedom. It was to provide a source of relaxation to the tense, taut thing that was me which panted for expression behind a twisted mouth.
英语短文故事4
Never Judge a Book by Its Cover
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the president of Harvard’s outer off ice .The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods country folk had not business at Harvard, and probably didn’t even deserve to be in Cambridge .She frowned. ”We want to see the president,” the man said softly.” He’ll be busy all day,” the secretary snapped.” We’ll wait,”
the lady replied. For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn’t. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president. ”Maybe i f they just see you for a few minutes, they’ll leave,” she told him. He signed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn’t have the time to spend with nobodies, but he detested gingham and homespun suits cluttering his office.
The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple .The lady told him, ”We had a son that attended Harvard for one year .He loved Harvard, and was very happy here. But he was accidentally killed. And my husband and I would like to erect a me morial to him somewhere on campus. ”The president wasn’t touched, and she was shocked, ”Madam,” he said gruffly, ”we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died, this place would look like a cemetery.
“Oh, no“ the lady explained quickly, “we don’t want to erect a statue .We thought we would give a building to Harvard.” The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, and then exclaimed, ”A building! Do you have and earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard.
For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased .He could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly.” Is that all it costs to start a university?” Her husband nodded .The president’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the university that bears their name -------a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.
英语短文故事5
CINDERELLA-THE REAL STORY
By Yvonne Augustin
I'm sure you have all heard the story of Cinderella. You know the beautiful girl with the two mean step-sisters, and wicked step-mother. Well you already know the ending, the beautiful girl marries the handsome prince, and they live happily ever after. Well that was the fairy tale, this is the real story.
My name is Oscar and I am a mouse.
I am not related to Mickey, Minnie, or Mighty, (even though there is a small resemblance to that super-hero Mighty mouse). I live in the attic in Cinderella's house. You might say Cindy and I were roommates.
When she was small, and her father was alive, we shared a beautiful room downstairs. But after her father died, she was put in the attic. I naturally followed, because I knew she would need my company. And need me she did. At first, she thought of me only as a common ordinary mouse. Night after night she would throw me crumbs. (I thought she was very kind). Then one night, after her step-mother locked the door, she began to cry. I climbed up on Cindy's lap. She talked to me and gave me my name. I thought at the time it was a nerdy name, "Oscar", but I am used to it now. I even kind-of like it.
Everyday I watched Cindy work sooo hard. Finally one day, quite by accident, I found a way to help her. You see, her step-sisters were ordering her around, and they made her cry. Cindy cried a lot. ( I never knew a girl could hold so much water!.) Anyway, I ran to Cindy and they saw me.
Boy, you should have seen them clear the room!. Faster than a speeding bullet-- they almost broke their necks as they ran screaming from the room. You should have heard them! "Eeeek...
a Mouse!","Mother!!", "Help". Cindy and I laughed so hard. It was a really good moment.
Then there was the time when I hid on a plate of food that was meant for Cindy's step-mother. When she saw me, first she fainted, then she had hysterics for three days!. Three days of peace!, that was really nice!.
The only other person who was not afraid of me was Esmerelda. She was Cindy's fairy God-Mother. We called her Essie for short. She just popped up on the day of the big ball. Poor Cindy had run herself ragged waiting on those step-sisters, trying to do the impossible, and make them.. not beautiful..but just presentable. I mean they were sooo ugly... it wasn't skin deep, it was all the way to the bone!.
Anyway, Cindy was talking to me in the garden, when this strange looking woman walked through the gate. Most people think she magically appeared in a beautiful white light, but she didn't.
She just walked in the yard with a brown Foodtown shopping bag in her hand. I really thought she was here for a hand-out. Cindy must have thought the same thing, because she offered her a glass of milk and some cookies. She didn't look much like a fairy God-mother, either. Her dress was torn, her shoes had holes, and her hair... well, let's just say I've seen a better hair-do on a horse I used to know.
I mean, this fairy God-mother looked like she needed a fairy God-mother.
I was about to say something like "Hit the road", when Essie
asked Cindy why she was not preparing to go to the ball. Cindy told her she had no clothes or transportation. Well!, faster than you could say " the rat ate the cheese", the old woman reaches into her bag and pulls out the most beautiful blue ball gown you have ever seen!. It was royal blue, with little white stars, and it was just Cindy's size!. Then, she reached in her bag again and pulled out a white evening bag, a silver crown, and the famous glass slippers. ( I had to turn my head while she provided the unmentionables.) Then she told Cindy to hop to it, and go change her clothes, while she sees what can be done about the transportation. I told her to call a cab, but she said "One does not arrive at a Kings palace in a cab or a rent-a car!".
Anyway, while I'm looking around for something to use, the old girl goes in the bag again, and pulls out a small coach. It was just about my size. She put it on the ground, and darned if the thing didn't begin to grow!. I ran for cover. When the coach finally stopped growing, it was just right for Cindy. The wonders of modern science!
Right then Essie called me, and.. like a dumb-dumb, I came. Before I knew what hit me, I had four hoofs and a tail. Seeing my alarm, Essie assured me it was only temporary. I didn't mind a little sacrifice for the cause (but I hate oats!).
By this time Cindy appeared, and she was looking hot!. (I even tried to whistle, but it came out a whinny). Cindy got into the coach and then we all realized the old girl had forgotten one thing... a driver.
So she grabbed a frog hopping through the garden, and turned him into a driver.
If you ask me, we would have saved a lot of time if she had just made him a Prince instead. They're always doing that in other
fairy tales, but noooooo, we had to do things the hard way.
Cindy was a smash at the ball. The Prince was totally captivated.
At midnight, they were going to get a cold drink of lemonade, when Cindy's dress started to come apart.
Well!, it didn't take a genius to figure out that she'd better get out of there. So she took off, with the Prince on her trail. .
Fortunately he was clumsy, and he tripped. That gave Cindy just enough time to jump into the coach and leave the Palace grounds. About half-way home the coach shrank so small, that Cindy had to get out and walk. It was then when she realized she had lost a shoe. Hobbling home on one shoe is no joke!.
All night long, Cindy talked about the Prince, the ball, and the great time she had. It was like her tongue got stuck by a phonograph needle. Essie finally gave up and left about 4:30 a.m., mumbling something about creating a monster. Cindy wore herself out around 6:00 am. It was a good thing the "steps" slept late that morning, or Cindy wouldn't have had any sleep at all!. Later that afternoon, the word came through the cheese-vine. The Prince would begin a search for the love of his life tomorrow. He had fallen in love at the ball last night, with a young lady he knew only by a slipper she left behind.
I was so excited to hear this news, I immediately went to tell Cindy. I must say she took the news rather well. With just a "Oh, that's nice to hear", she went back to her work. (I was expecting at least one jump for joy!)
The next day, the Prince came to our house and the "steps", (including their mother!), all tried to get their size 10 feet into this size 4 slipper. It's a wonder the poor slipper didn't break!. Cindy was locked in the garden and had no chance to try on the slipper.
That is when I saved the day.
As the Prince entered his coach, I ran under the horses hoofs. The stupid beasts were so frightened of a little mouse, they ran straight through the garden gate, nearly trampling Cindy in the process. It's a good thing that girl is light on her feet!.
The Prince was so apologetic it took him at least ten minutes before he realized this girl had not tried on the slipper. Well... we all know the end. She tried it on, it fit like a glove, and they lived happily ever after.
So the next time you hear the story of Cinderella, remember you heard the real story here first...from a small grey mouse named Oscar.。