Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

A person's life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they're actually willing to sacrifice for it.

Craig Clevenger

As with Hobbes, we see again, the power of fiction. Rousseau's acount of natural man was no more real than Hobbes's, but following the same pattern, once it became the accepted story of human origins, it thereby exercised the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In imagining Rousseau to be right, we have become what Rousseau imagined.

The story of Ramachandra, as narrated in the Valmiki Ramayan and the Adhyatma Ramayan, after reinforcing and revitalizing it with the essence of whatever the Puranas, the Vedas, and other scriptures could give, I, Tulsidas, am writing for the delight of my own soul.

This is a love story. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things. I never knew there were so many different ways to say goodbye.

Maggie Stiefvater

It's terribly demeaning to write something that tells its story in its own way and be told it fails because it might scare somebody. My God, must we speak with all the candor of a wax Elvis?

I really don't go in for talking about current events on the blog. The main reason for this is the fact that I am profoundly out of touch with the outside world. I don't have cable and I don't watch the news. On the rare occasion I miss the news and feel the need to absorb some fearmongering bullshit, I just drop a tab of acid and read a Lovecraft story. There's less pretense that way.

Patrick Rothfuss

'T is an old tale and often told;
But did my fate and wish agree,
Ne'er had been read, in story old,
Of maiden true betray'd for gold,
That loved, or was avenged, like me.

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.

I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will.

Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement. His method is narrative.... His subject is the story of man's past. His function is to make it known.

Barbara W. Tuchman

This is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a lie right from the start!

All stories are true, Skarpi said. But this one really happened, if that's what you mean. He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.

Patrick Rothfuss

It's not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

I always want to tell stories. But they must be stories that evolve, like our own lives. Perhaps what I seek is a new kind of story.

Michelangelo Antonioni

They [the younger woman artists in American Abstract Expressionism: Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell,] are the next generation and it is another scene, another story. You forget that in my generation Paris was still the leading school of painting and this situation was being changed by a tiny handful of artists to a scene called New York, America, which never before had a leading role in the art world. That didn't happen just by reading a newspaper. Now the next generation comes in and they may think it is rough for them but it is a pie... We broke the ground.

In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample.
And sometimes the gloves melt.

Neal Stephenson

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

Bonnie Friedman

Free yourself from the inauthenticity and disempowerment of your story.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Stories—individual stories, family stories, national stories—are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.