Quotes about story
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“I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: The Powerbook

People, World, Time

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

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykmZp5cgbkU <br class="br">Context: One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. 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.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Fools, Lovers

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

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Knowledge

“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.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Personality

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

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Suicide

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

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 32 : Morning
Context: One of the ghosts — an old woman — beckoned, urging her to come close.
Then she spoke, and Mary heard her say:
"Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories."
That was all, and then she was gone. It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we’ve unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep. It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, the night picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the open air. The dream was gone.
All that was left was the sweetness of that feeling, and the injunction to tell them stories.

Truth

“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?”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Life, Death

“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.”

Siri Hustvedt book The Summer Without Men

Source: The Summer Without Men

Love, Books, Reading

“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.”

Jane Yolen book The Devil's Arithmetic

Source: The Devil's Arithmetic

“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”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: Time's Power

Spring, Thinking

“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.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Pain, Family, Flowers, Time

“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.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Life, Death, Way, Loss

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

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

People

“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.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"Tell me A Story"

Time

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

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Personality

“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.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Men, Books, Education

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

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Source: Pontoon

“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.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“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.”

Curtis Sittenfeld (1975) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Man of My Dreams

Kiss, Waiting

“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.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Files

Source: The Demigod Files

Love, Thinking, Time

“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.”

Anne Bishop book Murder of Crows

Source: Murder of Crows

Time

“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.”

Tom Perrotta book The Leftovers

Source: The Leftovers

People, Dreams

“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.”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Life

“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”

Pat Conroy South of Broad

Source: South of Broad

Change, Time

“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.”

Anita Shreve book The Weight of Water

Source: The Weight of Water

Thinking, Water, Time, Hurt

“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.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Books

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

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

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

Anne McCaffrey (1926–2011) American-Irish novelist

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

Jacqueline Woodson book Brown Girl Dreaming

Source: Brown Girl Dreaming

Silence

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

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“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.”

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992) English author

Thinking, Change, Parting

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

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Source: Dona Rosita la soltera

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

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Ain't She Sweet

Love, Dead

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

Lev Grossman The Magician King

Source: The Magician King

“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.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Books, Feeling, Thinking, Reading

“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?”

Alexander McCall Smith In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Source: In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Life, People, Animals, Dead

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

Brad Meltzer (1970) writer

Beauty

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

Maeve Binchy (1940–2012) Irish novelist

Confidence

“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.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 56
Context: The bus ran along a very narrow strip of cement that stood up out of the water with no guard-rail, no nothing; that's all there was to it. The bus driver leaned back and we roared along over this narrow cement strip surrounded by water and all the people in the bus, the twenty-five or forty or fifty-two people trusted him, but I never did. Sometimes it was a new driver, and I thought, how do they select these sons of bitches? There's deep water on both sides of us and with one error of judgement he'll kill us all. It was ridiculous. Suppose he had an argument with his wife that morning? Or cancer? Or visions of God? Bad teeth? Anything. He could do it. Dump us all. I knew that if I was driving that I would consider the possibility or desirability of drowning everybody. And sometimes, after just such considerations, possibility turns into reality. 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. But none of the bus drivers ever dumped us. They were thinking instead of car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits. There wasn't a real man in the whole shitload.

Evil