Quotes about story
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“Life was more difficult in Inkheart, yet it seemed to Meggie that with every new day Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..”

Cornelia Funke (1958) author

Life, Beauty, Heart

“Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

Knowledge

“Everything's a story - You are a story -I am a story.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

“Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: I Am the Messenger

“Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves.”

Melissa de la Cruz book The Van Alen Legacy

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

People, Memory

“And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux

Reading

“This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Source: Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

Food, Knowledge

“Myths are simply stories about truths we've forgotten.”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Truth

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Drawing

“Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
-Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Love, Girl, Time

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Joan Didion book The White Album

Source: "The White Album", in The White Album

“I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

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

People

“You will have a story in there… or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

Patricia MacLachlan (1938) American writer of children's books

Source: Word After Word After Word

Time

“Each child’s story is worthy of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.”

Anderson Cooper (1967) journalist and author

Source: Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

Death

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”

Vikram Chandra (1961) Indian writer

World

“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

Love, Happiness

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Love, Life, People

“Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

People, Parting

“The story of how I left Huckleberry begins -- as do all worthy stories -- with a goat”

John Scalzi The Last Colony

Source: The Last Colony

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories…. I can change the story. I am the story.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

Change

“If you walk across my camera I will flash the world your story.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

World

“It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Education

“People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.”

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Life, People, Despair

“Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Love, Hate

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Children, Dreams, Color, Sea

“Stories are nations, empires.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins

“You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.”

Agatha Christie book Peril at End House

Source: Peril at End House

Reading

“He wants to put his story next to hers.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening…. I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Books

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Source: The Issa Valley

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

“How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Books, Reading, Parting

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

Barry Lopez (1945) American writer

“… If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.”

Reza Aslan (1972) Iranian-American author, commentator

Source: No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

Faith, Religion

“4: Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.”

Seth Godin book All Marketers Are Liars

All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World

Lie

“He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Books

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

Imagination

“But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”

Leslie Marmon Silko book Ceremony

Source: Ceremony

Parting

“…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me…”

"I’ve never much cared for horror stories.”

Anthony Horowitz Alex Rider

Source: Snakehead

Life, Books

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”

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

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Reading

“The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sadness, Nostalgia, Time

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Life, Way

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

Tana French In the Woods

Source: In the Woods

Truth, Lie

“Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Family

“You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Life

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

John Dominic Crossan (1934) American academic

Source: Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus

People

“Story of my life.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Life

“Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.”

Don DeLillo Mao II

Part 2, Ch. 10
Source: Mao II (1991)

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Birth

“I adored history, not the dry dates and boring battles, but the stories and the people who populated them.”

Deanna Raybourn (1968) American writer

Source: Silent in the Grave

People, History

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

Jasper Fforde book First Among Sequels

Source: First Among Sequels

World, Light

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Confidence, Dependency

“Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Way, Sleep, Change

“That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Happiness

“The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.'

'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

God

“We've been rehearsing a classic from antiquity,, the story of a young prince of Denmark who goes mad, drowns his girlfriend, and in his remorse, forces spoiled breakfast on all whom he meets.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

Madness

“Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.”

Jean Little (1932) Canadian children's writer

“I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Happiness, World, Peace, Singing

“He was dirty, his hair unkempt, his clothes stained with blood. Heroes in stories somehow managed to rescue maidens while looking like court dandies. Next time he went adventuring he'd remember to bring a comb.”

J.V. Jones The Book of Words

Source: The Book of Words

Time, Clothes

“Ninety percent of the children’s books patronize the child and say there’s a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don’t do that. I treat the child as an equal.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Children, Books

“The story of my family… changes with the teller.”

Jennifer Haigh (1968) Novelist

Source: Faith

Family, Change

“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Thinking

“Today's worries are yesterday's fears and tomorrow's stories.”

Alyson Nöel book Evermore

Source: Evermore

Fear

“My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate.”

Chelsea Handler book Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Source: Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Lie, Peace

“An ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

“Isn't that what a good story does? It pulls you in and never lets you go.”

Jennifer Donnelly (1963) American writer

Source: Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book

“Every hero is the villain of his own story.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“Well, why did you kill Jeremiah? And don't bother feeding me some story about how you just happened to wander along after he spontaneously died. I know you did this.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Time, Daughters, Speed

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”

Jean M. Auel (1936) Novelist

Thinking, Learning, Reading

“Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry.

Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.

McGough: Really? When?

Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time…”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

Suffering, Time

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Flying, Forgetting

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Books, Idea, Bee, Reading

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.”

Jennifer Weiner (1970) American writer

Heart

“Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not necessarily in that order.”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

“I guess some stories do not need telling.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Waiting, Forgetting

“This is a bad story.”
“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, you should,” I say.
“But—”
“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.”

Emma Donoghue Room

Source: Room

“You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption - of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don't be misled. They are news because they are the exceptions.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Lie, Reading

“I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Life, Fear

“The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.”

Emil Ludwig (1881–1948) German writer

Die Entscheidung, sich zum ersten Mal zu küssen, ist die wichtigste in jeder Liebesbeziehung. Es verändert die Beziehung von zwei Menschen wesentlich stärker als letzendlich die Kapitulation; denn dieser Kuss trägt die Kapitulation schon in sich.
Of Life and Love (2005), p. 29 [Über das Glück und die Liebe, 1940]

Love, People, Kiss, Decision

“If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

Gary Webb (1955–2004) American investigative journalist

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

People, Truth, Appearance

“Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1989)

Life

“It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

This is in fact something an admirer said, which Christie quoted with disapproval in LIFE magazine (14 May 1956), p. 98
Misattributed

“I'd had a long talk with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career. He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent. He said that after a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end.
Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Phlogiston interview (1995)

Money, Way, Feeling, Drink

“The European discovery rather than Aboriginal occupation constitutes Australia's pre-history. Australia - its economy, society and polity - is a construction of European civilisation. Australia did not exist when traditional Aborigines occupied the continent. Aborigines have been participants in Australian history, but that story begins with all the others in 1788.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

History

“Sickness, doctors, that scares me, not violence — helplessness. That's why I turn to violent stories.”

Warren Zevon (1947–2003) American singer-songwriter

As quoted in "Warren Zevon Dies" by Andrew Dansby, in Rolling Stone (8 September 2003) https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/warren-zevon-dies-250309/

“For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding of reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), How to Tell a True War Story

Way, Guy, Feeling, Reality

“People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time - Vol. II [Bernhard Tauchnitz] ( p. 57 https://books.google.com/books?id=sKYzAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA57) <br class="br">Also in Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide by Andrew Collins & Catherine Peters [Oxford University Press, 1998] (p. 139)

People, Reading

“Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam…. India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the Story of Civilization that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s. Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on Hindu Temples: What happened to them. These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Beauty, History, Suffering, Time

“The ‘novel’ is a publishing convention that deforms the story. If more attention were given to form there would be fewer novels and better stories. There's no reason a publisher can’t put out a story that's a hundred or even seventy pages long. But a publisher will look at a story like that as defective novel, ineligible for shortlists. It should be in a collection. Or pumped full of air, turned into a novel… It's a pity. You see some good writers behaving like performing monkeys.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

Interview by Tom Vowler (2010-13)

“And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Full Transcript of the Sixth Republican Debate in Charleston http://time.com/4182096/republican-debate-charleston-transcript-full-text/, Time (14 January 2016). <br class="br">2010s, 2016, January

Love, Death, People, World