Quotes about story
page 6

“Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Happiness

“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”

Walter Dean Myers book Monster

Source: Monster

Life, Feeling

“If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

God

“He had been my almost. My might-have-been.

I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss.

Still, I collected kiss stories.

-Susie Salmon”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Kiss

“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)

World, Light

“This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

Love, Way

“All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Cats

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”

Isaac Babel (1894–1940) Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer

Life

“How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.”

Jacqueline Woodson book Brown Girl Dreaming

Source: Brown Girl Dreaming

“I'm uninterested in superheroes. I am only interested in real stories, real people, real connection.”

Jamie Lee Curtis (1958) actress, author

People

“I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.”

Dan Rather (1931) Journalist, Anchor

Hell, Understanding

“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.”

Brennan Manning book The Ragamuffin Gospel

p. 11 https://books.google.com/books?id=sUTZCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11 <br class="br">1990s, The Ragamuffin Gospel (1990)

Life, God, Light, Learning

“I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Love, Happiness

“It’s a small story really, about, among other things:

* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
* A Jewish fist fighter
* And quite a lot of thievery”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Girl

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

John Irving In One Person

Source: In One Person

Love, Books, Way, Tear

“We may come from different places and have different stories, but we share common hopes, and one very American dream.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Source: 2015, Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality (June 2015)
Context: I know that Americans of goodwill continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue. Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact; recognize different viewpoints; revere our deep commitment to religious freedom. But today should also give us hope that on the many issues with which we grapple, often painfully, real change is possible. Shifts in hearts and minds is possible. And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them. Because for all our differences, we are one people, stronger together than we could ever be alone. That’s always been our story. We are big and vast and diverse; a nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, different experiences and stories, but bound by our shared ideal that no matter who you are or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love, America is a place where you can write your own destiny.

Dreams, Hope

“All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland

“In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Love, Life, Thinking

“The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Dentist
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Life, Lie, Secret, Art

“People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense-words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions-words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

People, History, Thinking

“You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.”

Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda

Source: Oscar and Lucinda

Feeling

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

History

“In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

“If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

“I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

“Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials

“You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: The Other Side of the Story

“Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

God, World, Birth, Reading

“Percy’d heard stories about amputees who had phantom pains where their missing legs
and arms used to be. That’s how his mind
felt—like his missing memories were aching.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Pain, Memory

“This is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a lie right from the start!”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: Fairy Tail, Vol. 1

Friendship, Lie, Cats

“But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Nature, Silence

“We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.”

Kamila Shamsie (1973) Pakistani writer

Understanding, Thinking, Memory, Forgetting

“You can make up your own story when you look at a photo.”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret & Official 'Hugo' Movie Companion

Photo

“You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.”

Margaret Atwood book Good Bones

Source: Good Bones

Motivation, Forgetting

“I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

People, Art

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 33 (p. 443).

“All the truth in the world is held in stories.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Truth, World

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

People, Reading

“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

“What were you doing with her?" I ask quietly.
"Apart from questioning her about your whereabouts, I was listening to the most intriguing story about my life moonlighting as a kidnapper.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Life, Question

“I want to know about my mom. And other stuff. I want to know the whole story, good or bad.”
“Me, too,” said Gazzy. “I want to find my parents so I can tell’m what total scuzzes they are. Like, ‘Hi, mom and dad, you’re such scum!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Moms, Parent

“Full stories are as rare as honesty.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 19, Hot Potting, A story by Baroness Frostbite

Fear, Hope, Thinking, Tear

“If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

People

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939)

God, Angels, Waiting

“… What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.”

Rabih Alameddine book The Hakawati

Source: The Hakawati

“But I didn't know about the other story."
"What other story?”
"About how you and Adrian Ivashkov are—"
"No, whatever you heard it’s not true."
"But it was really romantic"
"Then it’s definitely not true.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”

Ben Okri (1959) Nigerian writer

Fear, Heart

“When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) American translator

God, Reading

“What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Lie

“Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Fate, People, Beauty, Way

“The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are, they are not…”

Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) child psychologist and writer

Source: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

Life, Way, Past

“Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.”

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) Academic, novelist

“Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Life, Time

“Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Books, Heart

“I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once?”

Bill Willingham (1956) American comics writer and artist

Reading

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

Stephen King book Just After Sunset

Source: Just After Sunset

Cry

“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”

Scott Turow book Ordinary Heroes

Source: Ordinary Heroes

“Tell me a story then… keep me occupied."
"A story?… What makes you think I can tell a story?"
"Insight," said the king, "Go on.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Thinking

“Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.”

Jodi Picoult book Small Great Things

Source: Small Great Things

“There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

World, Night

“This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Life

“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”

Robin McKinley book Spindle's End

Source: Spindle's End

People, Way, Nature, Forgetting

“This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Faith

“It occurred to me that I was standing face to face with the hero of a love story nearly as dramatic as my own.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Love

“And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful… or if the fall had changed the story completely.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Beauty, Change, Princess

“Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else's story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.”

Ryū Murakami (1952) Japanese writer

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Life

“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown

Secret, Fight

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Life, People, World, Past

“What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?”

Michael Cunningham book By Nightfall

Source: By Nightfall

“Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks. The world has few stories glad in themselves, and we must have gay ears to defy Despite”

Stephen R. Donaldson book Lord Foul's Bane

Foamfollower, Lord Foul's Bane

World, Joy

“If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning? What if I told you, Perseus Jackson, that someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little boys can get over losing their mothers?”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

God, People, Boy

“We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Life, Happiness

“Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

Yann Martel book Beatrice and Virgil

Source: Beatrice and Virgil

Life, Music, Sense, Painting

“If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Way

“People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."

"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."

"The storyteller should tell it.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

People

“In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Source: Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Truth

“The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) American translator

God, Faith, Time

“I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Love Among the Chickens

Source: Love Among the Chickens

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Art, Music, Silence, Dance

“One of the best things you can relate to is a detailed story.”

Lisi Harrison (1970) Canadian writer

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Truth

“Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn't worth the time and effort.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Men, God, People, Thinking

“All that running and getting nowhere, he thought. Story of my life.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Life

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

World, Weather

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkdeath

Feeling

“Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Suffering

“And that is a story that no one can beat,
When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.”

Dr. Seuss book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937)
Source: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.”

Yann Martel book Beatrice and Virgil

Source: Beatrice and Virgil

Family, Animals

“The apple… came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.”

Jodi Picoult book Songs of the Humpback Whale

Source: Songs of the Humpback Whale

Tree

“know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

“Funny how a beautiful song could tell such an ugly story.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Variant: funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story
Source: Lock and Key

Beauty

“Yesterday was a closed book, tomorrow, however, was another story.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Books

“Surrounded by stories surreal and sublime, I fell in Love in the Library once upon a time.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Love, Time

“At least the girls in stories were alive before they died.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

Girl

Quotes about story page 6

Quotes about story
page 6