Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I used to be a lot more critical of Israel, and I used to believe there was a fairly simple two-state solution, because I used to believe the Arabs were acting in good faith. I still want to believe that, but the evidence tells me I'd be a fool to believe it, because I've seen that every concession Israel makes is met with more demands and more excuses not to negotiate. They could have had peace ten times over if they wanted it, but they don't want peace, they want victory, and they won't be happy until Israel is wiped from the map. A member of Fatah central committee said as much on television recently, but as he said, they keep that to themselves, and tell the rest of the world a different story.

This story is about love, which means that it is also about hate.

Philip José Farmer

Of course it's possible that there really ISN'T any shadow government. The whole thing could be a phony story that was fed to The Washington Post to mislead our enemies. As you recall, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently admitted that the Pentagon had set up an office-officially named "The Office of Disinformation"-that was supposed to put out false statements to the media, thus throwing our enemies off the track. For example, if we were getting ready to attack Iraq, officials of the Office of Disinformation would hold a press conference and state: "Well, we're certainly not going to attack Iraq!" The news media would report this, and Iraq would relax. France, meanwhile, would surrender.

The sentiment sounded trite, but then didn't most good sentiments sound trite? It was hard to make goodness – and good people – sound interesting. Yet the good were worthy of note, of course, because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.

Alexander McCall Smith

The plot of a movie is its motor. It is not an accident that people call pictures 'vehicles' for stars. A vehicle has to move. A plotless story is like an expensive car with a wonderful body design, luxurious seats, upholstery, headlights (production, direction, cast) — and no motor under its hood. That is why it gets nowhere.

The inside operation of Congress — the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building — is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.

Harry Potter has actually been a very intimate phenomenon, the story of small groups of people acting in ways they shouldn't, doing things they usually wouldn't, and making the kind of history that, without Harry, they pretty much couldn't.

but that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too

Every time I perform, I work really hard to give part of myself to the audience. Then I do an interview and I read some story that just isn't true, or someone draws a crazy conclusion about my life, and it's such a betrayal. It hasn't happened here, but in Croatia, I've had to stop reading about myself. I don't think actors mean to be secretive - they just don't want strangers looking through their kitchen window.

Goran Višnjić

And the evening of the big Vanity Fair arrived... Perry Rathbone and innumerable people received me in enormous halls. The reporter shot pictures and Mrs. Beckmann [Quappi, his wife] grinned – - o-la-La.... The whole story is a monumental caprice of my situation in Germany before the Nazi's.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

The progress of the colored people on this continent is one of the marvels of modern history. We are perhaps even yet too near to this phenomenon to be able fully to appreciate its significance. That can be impressed on us only as we study and contrast the rapid advancement of the colored people in America with the slow and painful upward movement of humanity as a whole throughout the long human story.

Calvin Coolidge

This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.

Robert H. Jackson

Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

George Saunders

Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do

The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together in a dark room.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Even knowing the ending was sad, I wouldn't have deprived myself the beauty of the story.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

Mary E. Pearson

In a place where everyone knew my story, it was nice to know there was a chapter that ONLY I HAD TO READ. :)

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

Malcolm Gladwell

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

Catherynne M. Valente