Quotes about story
page 7

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

People, Support, Thinking

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: Merlin

Truth, Heart

“Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you've ever heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn't win.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Love, Girl, Boy

“The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.”

Al Franken (1951) American comedian and politician

Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them (2003)

Money

“I wanted you to thank you for being my friend and letting me play a part in your story.”

Christopher Pike book The Last Vampire

Source: The Last Vampire

Parting

“I really like Septimus Heap. he is my favorite guy in the story. I should make you all read it.”

Angie Sage (1952) English author and illustrator

Guy, Reading

“Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”

John Hodgman (1971) American humorist

Life, Pain, Sense

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Life, World, Time

“The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life, World, Way, Understanding

“No stories or explanations,' Finnikin had once told him. 'When it comes to women, straight into an apology and you will find the rest of your life bearable.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Froi of the Exiles

Life, Women

“So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

God, Hope, Understanding, Chance

“He flung his arms around her neck, but only once he saw Silvertoungue's back was turned. He never knew with fathers. "I'll save him, Meggie!" he wispered in her ear. "I'll bring Dustfinger back. This story will have a happy ending. I swear!”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkspell

Happiness

“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”

Elizabeth Strout (1956) American writer

Source: My Name is Lucy Barton

Way

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

Imagination, Understanding

“Another story must begin!”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)
Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Context: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.

Star, Reading, Drawing

“You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Past, Dead

“The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."

(, 3 October 1892)”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

Source: Selected Prose

Books, Reading

“Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to”

James Patterson book Sundays at Tiffany's

Source: Sundays at Tiffany's

Life, Way

“Death steals everything except our stories.”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Source: In Search of Small Gods

Death

“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Love, Light

“Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Happiness

“Tell me a story of deep delight.”

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

“All we have is the story we tell.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

“Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

The Man in Bogota

Question

“A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Way of Kings, Part 1

Imagination

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Books, World

“If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Death, Moms

“… along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

David Abram (1957) American philosopher, ecologist

Source: The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

World, Dreams, Imagination, Tree

“Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: These Strange Ashes

God

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Love, Solitude, Reading

“But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Variant: Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.
Source: For One More Day

Mother's Day, For Mother

“Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Change, Perfection

“I know you guys are living out your own private Romeo and Juliet love story, but remember: Both of them die in Act V.”

Sara Shepard (1973) Author

Source: Ruthless

Love, Guy

“If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.”

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) American writer

Sex, Thinking

“It's only a story, isn't it?"…
"Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?”

David Eddings book Pawn of Prophecy

Source: Pawn of Prophecy

Truth

“When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

“Stories never really end… even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkspell

Books

“Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I’d always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.”

Alice Hoffman book The Ice Queen

Source: The Ice Queen

Home, Hell

“A legend, Kludd, is a story that you begin to feel in your gizzard and then over time it becomes true in your heart. And perhaps makes you become a better owl.”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

Feeling, Time, Heart

“It could have happened lots of ways. But this is the way it happened. This is the path we took. This is our story.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Way

“Tell them stories.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

As quoted in Can A Smart Person Believe in God? (2004) by Michael Guillen, Ch. 7 : Hope Springs Eternal, p. 90

God, Question

“Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Courage

“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
Even when there is no one.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 39-40)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“He snorted. “He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero.” None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.”

Naomi Novik book Uprooted

Source: Uprooted

Thinking

“we become the stories we tell ourselves”

Michael Cunningham book A Home at the End of the World

Source: A Home at the End of the World

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.”

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe

Source: Eastern Standard Tribe

Past

“The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.”

Jonathan Franzen book Freedom

Source: Freedom

Pain

“WARNING
If you dare to read this story, you become part of the Experiment”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Reading, Parting

“I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

First lines, Ch. 1 : Out to Sea
Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
Context: I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

Business

“Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys…”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

World, Jerk, Guy