Story Quotes

Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.

~ Brené Brown

If the characters are not wicked, the book is. We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the giant. Stories with fiery serpents and leviathans and sermons in whirlwinds. Stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections.

~ G.k. Chesterton

So what’s your story?” Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. “My story?”“Yeah. Everybody has at least one.

~ David Levithan

Stories in themselves are not automatically good, it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

~ Douglas Wilson

This was not a love story that ended in tragedy.This was a tragedy that ended in a love story.

~ Rachel Higginson

...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.

~ Donald Miller

A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever.

~ Nenia Campbell

I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to the idea, I felt like I was losing my mind. Ideas would pop into my head in the middle of the night, or during a midterm, and I missed them, quite narrowly, almost every time. Every time an idea left my mind without taking the shape of a word on paper, my mind would automatically begin to churn something just as impressive, or at least close to it. I was digging myself into a shallow grave, and I was getting nowhere. And this was even before the thoughts were committed to paper.

~ Leigh Hershkovich

Coincidences, mix-ups, harmless mistakes and switches. And so a story is born.

~ Lauren Oliver

Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.

~ Michael J. Kannengieser

My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.

~ Emma Thompson

Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

How did I discover saccharin? Well, it was partly by accident and partly by study. I had worked a long time on the compound radicals and substitution products of coal tar... One evening I was so interested in my laboratory that I forgot about my supper till quite late, and then rushed off for a meal without stopping to wash my hands. I sat down, broke a piece of bread, and put it to my lips. It tasted unspeakably sweet. I did not ask why it was so, probably because I thought it was some cake or sweetmeat. I rinsed my mouth with water, and dried my moustache with my napkin, when, to my surprise the napkin tasted sweeter than the bread. Then I was puzzled. I again raised my goblet, and, as fortune would have it, applied my mouth where my fingers had touched it before. The water seemed syrup. It flashed on me that I was the cause of the singular universal sweetness, and I accordingly tasted the end of my thumb, and found it surpassed any confectionery I had ever eaten. I saw the whole thing at once. I had discovered some coal tar substance which out-sugared sugar. I dropped my dinner, and ran back to the laboratory. There, in my excitement, I tasted the contents of every beaker and evaporating dish on the table.

~ Constantin Fahlberg

Behind every drama is a good story...behind every tear is the person who wrote it.

~ Faye Hall

Books,' I say sleepily. 'They don't change either. If you read a book and look at it again later on, it's still the same thing. But it's exciting all over again.

~ Truus Matti

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

~ Charles Eisenstein

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game)

~ Orson Scott Card

People who are left alone tell the story but are never a part of it; those who are a part of the crowd, are story bound, acting upon the role assigned to them in the theater of living, loving and longing.

~ Aporva Kala

Every heart has a story to tell. Some dreams have wings, some are torn at the seams and just sit there on the shelf. If you were to walk in my shoes, you would see that we are all the same. So find the love inside yourself because every heart has a story to tell.

~ Sara Haze

Truth only has one story, while a lie has a dictionary.

~ Ryan Trinder-James

Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.

~ N.d. Wilson

A true love story has no endings.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all, in the end, to make my own story find its finish.

~ Sarah Dessen

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life’s novelties. We’ve all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets. I’d always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside.

~ Christopher Hawke

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.

~ Margaret Atwood

In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from the city. When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall. Then, in his absence she worked over the profile, deepening, so that she might enjoy his face, and remember. One day the father slapped some potter’s clay over the gouged plaster; when the clay hardened he removed it, baked it, and showed it abroad (63).

~ Annie Dillard

Our love story is not written yet, it is mix of stupidity, fun and devotion.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

The words we construct, the poems we write and the songs we sing, become the love story of a stranger we have never seen.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Our stories are not new; yet, in the retelling we are reborn as heroes.

~ Harley King

A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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.

~ Jodi Picoult

The shortest distance between two people is a story.

~ Patti Digh

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

~ Jodi Picoult

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

~ Karen Healey

Once upon a time there was a man with no heart. Drifting through black-and-white life, caring naught for those hurt, and never, ever allowing another near enough to hurt him. Until, on the least likely day, the most unlikely place, the man with no heart met the most surprising person. He was fearless. He was strength and power. He wore his heart boldly on his sleeve. The man with no heart began, shockingly, to feel a movement in his breast. A stretching, a slow, steady beat...

~ Shannon Noelle Long

Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.

~ Leonard Michaels

I love books where I can't wait to turn every page, songs that grab me the first time I hear them, and films that make me totally forget about the craft because I am totally engaged in the story.

~ John Grooters

All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.

~ Salman Rushdie

Legends of the Silver Stallion had been told for years now, whenever mountain stockmen met round the campfires or on the winding hill tracks. Songs were sung about him to the cattle and both songs and tales had become even stranger since his supposed death when he vanished through the wind and the night over a great cliff. Tales kept cropping up of a ghost horse seen, or imagined, roaming over the mountains at night, of stockmen waking in a hut at midnight, hearing the tremendous stallion’s cry which could only be Thowra’s

~ Elyne Mitchell

Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?

~ K. Hari Kumar