Story Quotes

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

It's a very remarkable story.Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away.

~ James Hilton

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

~ Julio Cortázar

Without trials and tribulation, there would be no hero. Without a hero, there would be no story. Without a story, there is no life as life is made up of vignettes of loving, learning and overcoming.

~ Gibson

Your story is the greatest legacy that you will leave to your friends.It's the longest-lasting legacy you will leave to your heirs.

~ Steve Saint

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

~ Iain Banks

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

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

Every story is informed by a worldview.

~ Brian Godawa

Hard to accept the end of a story that won the villain against heroes.

~ Toba Beta

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

Many stories magnify a fact.

~ Toba Beta

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

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

~ Lionel Shriver

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

~ Elena Ferrante

Is there anyone’s life story you don’t want to know?”“Not really.” His expression was unexpectedly serious. “Because people make a story of their lives.Gains, losses, tragedy and triumph—you can tell a lot about someone simply by what they put into eachcategory. You can learn a lot about what you put into each category by your reaction to them. Theyteach you about yourself without ever intending to do it—and they teach you a lot about life.

~ Michelle Sagara West

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

~ Julian Barnes

She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story. Story within story.

~ Markus Zusak

You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and then they're content.

~ Karen Lord

I see a broken shell and I remind myself that something might have needed setting free. See, broken things always have a story, don't they?

~ Sara Pennypacker

Once upon a time, the Reindeer took a running leap and jumped over the Northern Lights.But he jumped too low, and the long fur of his beautiful flowing tail got singed by the rainbow fires of the aurora.To this day the reindeer has no tail to speak of. But he is too busy pulling the Important Sleigh to notice what is lost. And he certainly doesn’t complain.What's your excuse?

~ Vera Nazarian

Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.

~ Milan Kundera

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.

~ Michael Cunningham

I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.

~ Budd Schulberg

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.

~ Peter Watts

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

~ George Steiner

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

~ Donald Miller

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

~ Frederick Weisel

There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.

~ Markus Zusak

I don't really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn't really. It's just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.

~ Markus Zusak

There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. 

~ Gerald Hausman

Am not great, but being the story of every whisper is just the greatest.

~ Ahmed Farrag

It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more facts than they can process effectively. Giving them even more facts adds to the wrong pile. They don't need more facts. They need help finding their wisdom. Contrary to popular belief, bad decisions are rarely made because people don't have all the facts.

~ Annette Simmons

We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy.The land holds stories.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension. You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it.

~ Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.

~ Fish

The story of his great-grandfather . . . was his own story, too.

~ Kelly Cherry