Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

So you want to know all about me. Who I am. What chance meeting of brush and canvas painted the face you see? What made me despise the girl in the mirror enough to transform her, turn her to into a stranger, only not. So you want to hear the whole story. Why I swerved off the high road, hard left to nowhere, recklessly indifferent to those coughing my dust, picked up speed no limits, no top end, just a high velocity rush to madness.

The story is so easy that I hold off on it as long as I can, dealing exhaustively with those elements that are underneath; testing the abstractions at every step, for it is they which, in the last analysis, will provide the meaning and the truth of all that is to come, and the whole weight and authority of the book.

The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.

James Anthony Froude

Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life.

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free.

It felt as if maybe the curse had lifted, the tide had shifted, but then the breeze picked up and a skeet took a very unfortunate turn. Seconds later, Angus was pulling his shot far to the right, shooting a large hole in the second-story galley not ten feet above Marcus's head.

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.

Stephanie Zacharek

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.

I had more flow as a designer. I could just drop down into the zone and stay there for hours. With cartooning, I'm constantly coming up for air, procrastinating, looking for reasons not to be doing it. I spend all day granting myself special dispensation, with 'creative process' as my cover story. Carpenters and deli countermen can't do that, so I think they may feel better about themselves at the end of the day.

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 suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's.

Interestingly, it's as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey, the embodiment of the very adventure that all people in every epoch have desired.

Finally men were saved only through God's son dying for them, and that unless human beings believed this silly, impossible and wicked story they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence really believe that a child born today should be doomed because the snake tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it is devil-worship.

Clarence Darrow

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

Mary Augusta Ward

What the hell is Dianetics and Scientology? It's a religion. A religion of self. It's one man's religion. One man's labyrinth. A trip of L. Ron Hubbard's. A trip he lays on everyone else as 'the trip,' their trip, your trip. A science fiction story he wrote and forced into reality within the heads of others by the will of L. Ron Hubbard. The self-created fantasy of one man brought to deadly reality for others by a simple word: agreement.

Oh, by the way, there's a story going around, do you know? They say that General Lee was asleep, and the army was marchingby, and fifteen thousand men went by on tiptoe so as not to wake him.

I am writing graffiti on your body.
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried.

An ugly woodshed that's there, right on the ground, is handsomer to me than a ten-story temple that isn't there.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.