Quotes about story

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“An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart…”

“Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.”

“Just like any woman,… we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.”

“Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.”

“This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.”

“The story of one person is the story of all of humanity.”

“Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”

“Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”

“Every man is a hero in his own story, Princess.”

“An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.”

“I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.”

“We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.”

“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”

“when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

“And now you'll be telling stories
of my coming back
and they won't be false, and they won't be true
but they'll be real”

“Love’s easy. It kind of comes with the territory. But liking is another story.”

“Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.”

“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“Immortals are, by definition, immortal. End of story.”

“You love me," she said. "That's enough. We love each other."

"Yes. Yes, that's true." He smiled. "We are a love story.”

“Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

“If you own this story you get to write the ending.”

“The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy.”

“When God closes a door, he opens a window. Yeah. The problem was that this particular window opened off the tenth story, and he wasn't so sure God supplied parachutes.”

“I am going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

“Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.”

“But answer me this: how can a story end happily if there is no love?”

“What's the use of stories that aren't even true?”

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”

“every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged”

“Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?”

“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”

“If something wants to be a story, it will be.”

“Some stories stayed with you even when you wanted to forget them.”

“Stories only happen to people who can tell them.”

“This is my story; I promise to leave nothing out.
First you will smile, and then you will cry - don't say you haven't been warned.”

“Religion has what is EASILY the greatest bullshit story of all time.”

“I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.”

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

“People will tell you most of the story… and I’ve learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they’re afraid.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.”

“Moments are history. If you have enough of them, they become a story.”

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”

“Without story books is like a person with no soul.”

“And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.”

“Sad stories make good books”

“I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

“I am the lord of Redmont Fief. He is my tenant. I am his commander. End of story. Ipso facto. Case-o closed-o.”

“The choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

“I surrendered my beliefs
and found myself at the tree of life
injecting my story into the veins of leaves
only to find that stories like forests
are subject to seasons”

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”

“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.”

“By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.”

“The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

“at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.”

“Let me get this straight. The future of our relationship hinged on advice from a fifteen-year-old girl, a probably untrue story from a one-eyed Chihuahua trainer, and me unromantically - yet skillfully - kissing you on top of silverware and china?”

“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” Adam asked as we went back upstairs.

“Sometime,” I told him. “When we're telling ghost stories around a campfire, and I want to scare you.”

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

“But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.”

“Please tell me you did not bring me out here so you could tell me a very boring story about your sister.”

“I drove in last night,' he said. 'I couldn't sleep, it was too hot. So I went outside. I was feeling melancholy. Then I danced with a beautiful girl, and I felt better. What's your story?”

“You can't be real," Delilah murmurs.
"Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?”

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

“Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.”

“It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.”

“This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

“people who say its a long story, mean it's a stupid short one that they are too embarrassed and couldn't be bothered to tell”

“Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story… your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for awhile, we're less alone.”

“A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.”

“It's actually a rather romantic and dramatic story --- one I would eagerly tell you, except for the fact that I recently forgot it, based on it being far too long and having not enough decapitations.”

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

“There is no greater power on this earth than story.”

“Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.”

“You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.”

“The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

“When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

“How stupid lovers can be! But if they were not, there would be no story.”

“She would like to hear that now, even if it was a lie. Because some lies are beautiful. Stories do not tell you that.”

“I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.”

“I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.”

“Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.

They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

His fairy story.”

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

“Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.”

“That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.”

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”

“Politics always change. Stories never do.”

“But I kept it to myself--maybe because I didn't think it mattered, but probably because, in a place where everyone knew my story, it was nice to know there was a chapter that only I had read.”

“If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.”