Story Quotes

People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white.

~ Tawny Lara

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'.A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray.Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

~ Alain De Botton

Be my bedtime story and the thoughts that won't let me fall asleep. Be the conversation that I always have in my head at 3 AM and that beautiful voice that never lets me sleep.

~ Akshay Vasu

One dead and one alone. That's how the story ends.

~ Karen Quan

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.

~ Gaston Bachelard

The best stories have many meanings, their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Ive learnt the most about myself through the people and places i no longer visit, such an ironic exprience.The greatest lessons are from those we give the keys of our hearts to & trust all too easily; realising later on, they are just apart of this grande' story and not everyone gets to make it to the end chapter & happy ever after.

~ Nikki Rowe

You story must be best told by you. Your experience is a sacred life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. At some point the shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes that used to move you now only rock the boat. You got the wife, but you don't know if you like her anymore and you've only been married for five years. You want to wake up and walk into the living room in your underwear and watch football and let your daughters play with the dog because the far shore doesn't get closer no matter how hard you paddle.The shore you left is just as distant, and there is no going back; there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch, and sink into the sea. Maybe there's another story at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you don't have to be in this story anymore.

~ Donald Miller

I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte

~ Charlotte Eriksson

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

~ Gregory Maguire

Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.

~ Daniel C. Dennett

If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.

~ Robert Coles

Life is Like a Book, You cant Just read the Back, you Have to Dive in and Experience The Story within

~ Look Im A Cat

Most information doesn’t constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that’s a very different concept from information.

~ Ian Stewart

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

~ Michael Flynn

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.

~ Mark Sayers

Corporate & personal branding both require storytelling to be captivating. Stories provide context, meaning & the opportunity for relationship.

~ Ryan Lilly

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

~ Robert Mckee

I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling his heart beating against me. I wish I could gather time around us, slowing the minutes, making them last a lifetime.“I was born on the island kingdom of Ghedda,” I whisper. This is a story I never told even to you, Habiba. I tell it now only because I cannot bear to leave him without the truth, knowing only half of me. I raise my head and meet his eyes. “That was more than four thousand years ago. I was the eldest daughter of a wise and generous king.”Aladdin stares at me, his eyes soft and curious, encouraging me to go on.“When I was seventeen, I became queen of Ghedda. In those days, the jinn were greater in number, and the Shaitan held greater sway over the realms of men. He demanded we offer him twenty maidens and twenty warriors in sacrifice, in return for fair seas and lucrative trade. I was young and proud and desired, above all else, to be a fair ruler. I would not bow to his wishes, so he shook our island until it began to fall into the sea.”I shudder, and Aladdin draws me closer.“I climbed to the alomb at the top of the Mountain of Tongues, and there offered myself to the Shaitan, if he would only save my city from the sea.” My voice falls to a whisper, little more than a ripple on the water. “So he took me and made me jinn and put me in the lamp. And then he caused the Mountain of Tongues to erupt, and Ghedda was lost to fire. For he had sworn only to save my people from the sea, not from flame.

~ Jessica Khoury

Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I'm choosing my own story.Because if you can't do that, you might as well just give up.

~ Patrick Ness

Everyone had a story behind them, a past richer than she had imagined.

~ Tyrean Martinson

Once you realize your past is just a story, it no longer has any power over you.

~ Robert Tew

One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.

~ Philip Roth

People didn’t know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it...also maybe it seems like it would be okay not to be perfect. Nobody was perfect back then. Just about everyone was defective, and most people had no choice except to stay that way.

~ Carol Rifka Brunt

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

~ Jodi Picoult

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

~ Heather Anastasiu

I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.

~ Isabel Allende

It’s easy to think that if we had a different house, different car, different job, different relationship, different city, everything would be different; that we would feel different then.The problem is, you are the main character in the story that is your life. No matter how much you alter the setting of that story, you can’t escape from yourself. There are many factors which contribute to your experience on this planet, but ultimately, you are the one creating your experience here. In order to get to the life you are here to live, you must begin by becoming the person you are here to become.

~ Stephen Lovegrove

I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in the world, because to share our story we must first accept it. We must own it. We must stop running from it or shoving it into the corner when company comes over. To share our story is to admit that we've been changed.

~ Anna White

The best advice is not to write what you know, it's to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best- write the story you want to read.

~ Austin Kleon

I advise all people that have had an interaction with the police to obtain a copy of the police report, as you may find a very different story in there to what actually occurred.

~ Steven Magee

Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

~ Chuck Wendig

Just do it. Now.

~ M. Yeats

This is your story and you get to decide how it's written.

~ Rebekah Elizabeth Gamble

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.

~ Mark Twain

We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.

~ Shauna Niequist

Laughter lights up the darkness.

~ A.d. Posey