Quotes about story
page 11

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Truth, History, Time, Parting

“I am Tessa Gray,” she said in a low, clear voice. “And I believe in the importance of stories.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Whitechapel Fiend

“Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Fire and Hemlock

Source: Fire and Hemlock

“We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

God, Books

“Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Here I Am

Source: Here I Am

Forgetting

“Appearances are significant, and never more than in politics. You can always sway the crowd, provided you have a good story.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Appearance

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”

Nick Flynn (1960) American writer

Fear, Feeling, Silence

“Time for the likeliest story since Mary told Joseph it was God’s.”

Val McDermid (1955) Scottish crime writer

God, Time

“The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.”

Juliet Marillier book Son of the Shadows

Source: Son of the Shadows

Fear, Travel

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in Esquire (April 1960); republished as "The Northern Protestant" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

Art

“ʺWhy,ʺ he began slowly, ʺis Victor Dashkov joining us?ʺ
ʺWell, itʹs kind of a funny story…ʺ”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“Not everyone has a sob story, Charlie, and even if they do, it's no excuse.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The story is always better than your ability to write it.”

Robin McKinley (1952) American fantasy writer

“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.”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Daughter of the Blood

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

People, Books, Disappointment, Nature

“I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Time

“I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Way, Passion, Dance

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”

Umberto Eco book The Island of the Day Before

Source: The Island of the Day Before

World

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”

David Byrne book How Music Works

Source: How Music Works

Sea

“Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Way, Feeling

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility…. Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: Pieces of White Shell

Family, Past, Future

“That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Life

“A person’s never too old for stories. Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. - Roland Deschain”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

Girl, Boy, Personality

“It gets so tiring, this strong-picking-on-the-weak stuff. It was the story of my life -literally- and it seemed to be a big part of the outside world too. I was sick of it, sick of guys like these, stupid and bullying.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Life, Stupidity, World, Guy

“Our story is over, though in its end lies its beginning.”

Sally Gardner book The Red Necklace

Source: The Red Necklace

“Terry was beside himself. Not literally. This story would be that much more painful if there were two Terrys, able to stand next to each other and simultaneously curse Leven.”

Obert Skye book Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret

Source: Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret

Pain

“… I feel as though I am shelved. That I have been given the words to the story of my life, but that I have remained largely unread…”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Enshrined

Life, Feeling

“They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

Stupidity

“Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Source: Before Midnight: A Retelling of Cinderella

“It was one of those and so they died/the end stories, that made us demigods feels all warm and fuzzy inside.-Percy”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Feeling

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

Gilda Radner (1946–1989) American comedian

Way, Learning, Perfection

“I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Thinking

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Life, Death

“Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Thinking

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

Stephen King book Danse Macabre

Source: Danse Macabre

“Sorry, there´s no magic bullet. You gotta eat healthy and live healthy to be healthy and look healthy. End of story.”

Morgan Spurlock (1970) American filmmaker, screenwriter and producer

Source: Don't Eat This Book

“I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Standup Comic (1999)
Context: A fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said "no."

Girl, Sleep