Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they've picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can't have the one without the other.

George Bernard Shaw

The whole of salvation history is the story of God looking for us: he offers us love and welcomes us with tenderness.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.

Ernest Hemingway

The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, "Where is the best place to go to?" He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages--heaven for climate, and hell for society.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

And ever, as the story drained The wells of fancy dry, And faintly strove that weary one To put the subject by, "The rest next time—" "It is next time!" The Happy voice cry. Thus grew the tale of Wonderland

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.

The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we're going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous.

Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do." "Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years. But now, come. We must meet the master of this house.

To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists. The growth of philosophy is the story of man's spiritual life.

As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.

A short story is a different thing all together — a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude and went into some desert.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

In nine cases out of ten the speaker or writer who, seeking to influence public opinion, descends from calm argument to unfair blows hurts himself more than his opponent.
The Chinese have a story on this—a story based on three or four thousand years of civilization: Two Chinese coolies were arguing heatedly in the midst of a crowd. A stranger expressed surprise that no blows were being struck. His Chinese friend replied: "The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

Matilda Briggs…was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

Arthur Conan Doyle

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

Jean-Paul Sartre