Story Quotes

“Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .
. . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God.”
― Yann Martel

“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“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, The Pull

“My scars tell a story. They are a reminder of times when life tried to break me, but failed. They are markings of where the structure of my character was welded.”
― Steve Maraboli

“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“Always stick to the story. It was when you started backtracking that people got in trouble. Interrogation 101.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Lucky One

“The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.”
― James Carroll

“I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.
Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father's world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.”
― Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting With God In A Distracting World

“The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else's voice.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.”
― Isabel Allende, Mi país inventado: Un paseo nostálgico por Chile

“It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

“Every story is informed by a worldview.”
― Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films With Wisdom & Discernment

“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.”
― Adam Johnson

“Hard to accept the end of a story
that won the villain against heroes.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly?”
― F.K. Preston, The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing

“Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward.”
― Bridget Asher

“We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Many stories magnify a fact.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Just because they're a story doesn't mean they're not real.”
― H. M. Bouwman, The Remarkable & Very True Story of Lucy & Snowcap

“The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“It's a story you can break down and analyze and find analogies and lessons in it, and then it becomes a story about life. But you can also experience it whole, and then it's not a story about life. Then it is life.”
― Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist