Story Quotes

N. Scott Momaday

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

N. Scott Momaday

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

Vera Nazarian

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Karl Lagerfeld

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

Chelsie Shakespeare

The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .

Chelsie Shakespeare

He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.

Chelsie Shakespeare

He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.

Chelsie Shakespeare

I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.

Chelsie Shakespeare

When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.

J. Michael Strazynski

A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.

Toni Morrison

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Paulo Coelho

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

Shannon Hale

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

Horacio Quiroga

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

Julio Cortázar

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

Umberto Eco

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.

Pam Houston

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Alysha Speer

Only write a story that only you can write.

Christopher Vogler

I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

Silas House

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

Julio Cortázar

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Adam Johnson

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Stephen King

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Don Roff

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

Pat Conroy

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

Henry James

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Julio Cortázar

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

Michael Martone

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

Jonathan Harnisch

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark - the perfect time for creativity.

Jyoti Arora

No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.

Ryan Lilly

A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.

Toba Beta

If there were a master of stupidity in this world,
I would really love to listen to his success story.

Sanhita Baruah

To write is to reveal oneself.
When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.
I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

Michael Bassey Johnson

We do not have to see the beginning and the end of our lives, but we must close our eyes and live as if we didn't start or would never end.

Alessandra Torre

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

H.B. Bolton

A story just isn't a story without a dragon.

Munia Khan

The world of light and starry grace;
within your mind I live to trace.
Your thought’s speed in thunder’s glory,
lightening my being with dream’s story.
I embrace the tree carrying your name
Your unspoken wish : the heart of fame.

Roger Zelazny

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Sara Sheridan

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

Paula Danziger

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Vera Nazarian

The world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Neal Stephenson

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

Nirav Sanchaniya

Some people don’t want to hurt your feelings.

Sara Sheridan

Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

C.S. Lewis

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Sol Luckman

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Stephen King

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Arzum Uzun

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

Aniruddha Sastikar

Every individual is an author in himself. It is only that he falls short of words to express; list of stories.

Madeleine L'Engle

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.

Nema Al-Araby

You have to have a plot too, you know? Because without it, your life is less of a story and more of an empty paper.

Alina Radoi

they say that girls are the ones who want fairy tail endings, but then again, who are the authors of fairy tales? mostly men...

Terry Pratchett

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

VicDo

Whatever how much you know,
if you don’t know, who you are,
in what world you are living, or simply where you are,
and from where you came from.
Because if you do know, that's completely different story.
18.09.11

Ally Condie

Cassia.
I know which life is my real one now, no matter what happens. It’s the one with you. For some reason, knowing that even one person knows my story makes things different. Maybe it’s like the poem says. Maybe this is my way of not going gentle.
I love you. (Ky Markham)

Christopher Moore

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But how could you live and have no story to tell?. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Neil Gaiman

Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')

Arundhati Roy

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Douglas Pagels

Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.

Brené Brown

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

Sarah Kay

Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.

Joseph Campbell

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

Kazuo Ishiguro

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

Diane Setterfield

All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

Paul Auster

The truth of the story lies in the details.

Jacqueline Carey

A little truth seasons a lie like salt.

Heather Bouwman

Just because they're a story doesn't mean they're not real.

Deb Caletti

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.

Beth Neff

Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away as she could, and then watching to see what would happen next, what would roll back to her, what would have gotten left behind.

Louis De Bernières

The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it's better not to tell the truth.

Lionel Shriver

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

Jeremy Aldana

My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind

J.C. Reed

To love someone so deeply is to risk losing yourself forever. Once I admitted my feelings to him, there was no going back - no hope to ever make my heart complete without him

J.C. Reed

I hated him, loved him, wanted him, and yet I wished him away. So many conflicting emotions of wants and needs. So much fear. Not because of him, but because of myself - of how deep my feelings and desires were running, and how much I would fall if I happened to lose my grip.

Dave Matthes

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting
I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

John Eldredge

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.

Paul E. Miller

Sometimes when we say "God is silent," what's really going on is that he hasn't told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.

Paul E. Miller

If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.

Paul E. Miller

As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.

Chris Burkmenn

The story of getting there is greater than the story of being there. Wherever your there might be.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.

Charlotte Eriksson

Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.

Charlotte Eriksson

No story is worth telling without the twists and turns. Make them count instead.

Bidemi Mark-Mordi

For impact, tell your true story -challenges, victory, all. Build hope by helping others find themselves by your story.

Mae West

You are never too old to become younger!

Liz Lochhead

No one could say the stories were useless
for as the tongue clacked
five or forty fingers stitched
corn was grated from the husk
pathwork was pieced
or the darning was done...

(from 'The Storyteller Poems')

Buky Ojelabi

People cannot relate to a perfectionist, there is beauty in brokenness. Your story will bring healing to others.

Charles F. Glassman

Our story begins at home, but it doesn’t have to end there.

Charlotte Eriksson

Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.

Erin K. Casey

Saved or searching, we all need to be reminded of God’s interest in us individually and His love for us personally.

Eugene H. Peterson

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

Mark Sayers

In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.

Hilary Mantel

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

John Berger

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Anne Fadiman

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

Patricia Finney

I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can't imagine it being true at all.

Christopher Morley

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Now Leroux, what think you
Of this twist to the story?

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