Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Why should not I call my works 'symphonies', 'arrangements', 'harmonies', and 'nocturnes'?... The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. My picture of 'Harmony in Grey and Gold' is an illustration of my meaning – as snow scene with a single black figure and lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture, Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.

James McNeill Whistler

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K. Le Guin

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement; and if a story is told of more than common interest, ennui is sure to have its joy in adding embellishments. If hours did not hang heavy, what would become of scandal?

George Bancroft

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

Timothy Radcliffe

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Harold Rosenberg

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Flannery O'Connor

That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.

Ernest Hemingway

In my end is my beginning - that's what people are always saying. But what does it mean? And just where does my story begin? I must try and think...

Agatha Christie

I long to hear the story of your life, which must captivate the ear strangely.

William Shakespeare

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

If you really come down to any large story that interests people – holds the attention for a considerable time... human stories are practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

G. K. Chesterton