A student wrote an essay-story whose purpose was to end a text with the sentence, "When I woke up, I felt alive."

This reminded me of a one-sentence short story cited by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (which means for us): "When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

I found a reference to this on the web: it appears to have written by a Guatemalan writer named Augusto Monterroso. The Wikipedia page on Monterroso provides a different version of the story, in the third person! I don't have Calvino's book (I read it long ago, having borrowed it from a friend or the library), but I am sure he quotes it in the first person.

I also remember (perhaps incorrectly) how Calvino refers to Monterroso in his section on "quickness," but also refers to Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities as a book characterized by brevity, despite its being well over 1000 pages long (and unfinished). "Quickness" is a matter not only of length, but also of focus.