Story Quotes

Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.

~ Brian Francis Slattery

Propositions are to stories (and to reality) as powdered milk is to what comes from the udder. Propositions are dried-out stories with much of the vitality removed. They may say something technically true, just as powdered milk is still technically a form of milk, but they do not win our hearts and are not enough on which to nourish a life.

~ Daniel Tayler

Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.

~ Tove Jansson

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

~ Darren Shan

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

~ Stephenie Meyer

The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.

~ Michel Houellebecq

We're all born an empty page.

~ Lauren Destefano

Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

God is the story nature tells to those who are listening.

~ Steve Maraboli

A brief, well-crafted story that is relevant to your topic is one of the most potent ways to maintain the attention of your audience. But the story must be kind. Benjamin Disraeli said: Never tell unkind stories. Inconsiderate and insensitive stories do not bring grace to those who hear them, and may actually leave the audience dispirited.

~ Bruna Martinuzzi

It is one of those stories that you just want to keep going and going - even after the last page has been reached. Kristie Leigh Maguire

~ Vicki M. Taylor

She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she’d been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts “the baby teeth of a snake,” and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn’t even have to explain to her what he meant by “the opposite”; she knew it was the opposite of her.

~ David Grossman

The sleds accelerated quickly as they glided effortlessly over the smooth ice. We had never before experienced such a quick, easy slide. usually we wished we could push ourselves to make our sleds go faster. But not this time. The crystals of ice started flying past at an incredible rate of speed. No longer aware of where my sister and her sled were, all I could see was raw ice whizzing by ten inches under my chin at a rate of speed I never imagined I would experience on a sled. I felt like I was flying!

~ Daniel Boerman

If a story is w/out flaws or doubts, it is flattery or even brainwashing. You should read it as if drinking a glass of water. But be prepared - you would not remember its taste.

~ Vinko Vrbanic

The story is uneven in its progression.

~ Ichtys

Our own story is even more important for us to know than history.

~ Kristin Cashore

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.

~ Joss Whedon

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.

~ Erich Segal

I know the resolution. I know the end of the story before it ever begins. I must choose love. And for this, I will surely die.

~ Addison Moore

So it's happened, I kept thinking, you're in the middle of a story exactly as you've always wanted, and it's horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you're not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn't half as much fun as I'd expected.

~ Cornelia Funke

Stories have a unique power, David. The Inuit believe they can capture souls.

~ Chris D'lacey

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

~ Cynthia Ozick

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

~ Jo Deurbrouck

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child

~ Miguel Syjuco

The path you create then follow becomes the story of your life.

~ Steven Redhead

If we told every story from the middle, we would never appreciate happy endings.

~ Jessica Brody

Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.

~ Cathryn Louis

And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.

~ Steven Herrick

The story I am going to tell has more than one beginning and without an end.

~ T. Afsin Ilgar

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

~ Chris Everheart

It was just the human story again, flowing through me as it did through everyone else, and I'd mistaken it as my own.p 284

~ Frank Huyler

...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...

~ John Geddes

This story will never go down.

~ Henry Fielding

And what so tedious as a twice-told tale.

~ Homer

But that is another story.

~ Rudyard Kipling

I cannot tell how the truth may be I say the tale as 'twas said to me.

~ Walter Scott

And thereby hangs a tale.

~ William Shakespeare

For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad so tender yet so true.

~ William Shenstone

Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.

~ Paul Ryan

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.

~ Frank Luntz