Quotes about story

page 10

“A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”

“Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.”

“Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”

“If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen… A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.”

“Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.”

“Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”

“Without death,' he answered, 'life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”

“We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

“If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread”

“Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

“There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.”

“People see in stories what they're looking for, my young friend.”

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

“I'm a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell.”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.”

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

“If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.”

“Grover: It’s a very sweet love story. I get misty-eyed every time I play it. So does Percy, but I think that’s because he’s laughing at me.”

“Human females, they're kind of crazy during this time aren't they?

If you chose to believe the stories written by male writers.

They heard a bang and thump from the kitchen. Followed by Meg yelling at something.

That many males can't be wrong.”

“That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.”

“My name is Magnus Chase. I’m sixteen years old. This is the story of how my life went downhill after I got myself killed.”

“What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts”

“Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.”

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”

“I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.”

“A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.”

“Even the silence
has a story to tell you.
Just listen. Listen.”

“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”

“I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.”

“If I told you the whole story it would never end… What's happened to me has happened to a thousand woman.”

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

“This must be what an addict feels like, I think,
trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.”

“A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?”

“Stories aren’t the beauty of what did happen. They’re the beauty of what could happen.”

“I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”

“For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil.”

“I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

“Every love story is a ghost story.”

“Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore”

“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”

“I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.”

“Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.”

“Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.”

“Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

[Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories. ]”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“All stories are true.”

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.”

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”

“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”

“Who has time to make up stories when the truth is so much more interesting?”

“Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”

“I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.”

“They say a story loses something with each telling.”

“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

“There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”

“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”

“If you try to turn me against Lissa one more time the stories are going to be about you bleeding because I'll have ripped your throat out!”

“Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”

“There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.”

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”

“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”

“He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies.”

“Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.”

“I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.”

“When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

“Suddenly, details seemed extremely important. Details were something to grab on to, a way to insert myself into the story.”

“Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.”

“he's a story i want to know from page one”

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”

“Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

“But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own.”

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

“The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.”

“Don't you love Jesus?' Well, I thought an' I thought an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.”

“You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't. Trust me, I was there. I know.”

“This is as much a part of my story as anything else. Friendship is love as much as any romance.”

“Maybe, in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.”

“If I could have anything I wanted, I would choose story without end, and it seems I have lots of company in that.”

“Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.”

“The Bible just said ‘Thou shalt not kill’, then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.”

“She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”

“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it
are no longer the same interpreters.”

“And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn- you sometimes lose track of the beginning.”

“You are the Hero of your own Story.”

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

“Oh, for Thor's sake…" said Hiccup. "I thought that was just a story…"
"Stories come from somewhere," said the witch. "The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise.”

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

“Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, "and then everything burst into flames.”

“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark.”

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

“The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story”