Story Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.

Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annexe." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.

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

G. K. Chesterton

A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret.

Søren Kierkegaard

Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.

J. R. R. Tolkien

It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

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.

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

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

It was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones, and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.

G. K. Chesterton

To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey. To those who suffer, God does not provide arguments which explain everything; rather, his response is that of an accompanying presence, a history of goodness which touches every story of suffering and opens up a ray of light.

Everyone knows the glory of the twain
Who gave America the aeroplane
To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane.
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom's story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.

Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

Read your own hearts and Ireland's present story,
Then feed her famine fat with Wellesley's glory.

If you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing.

All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

William Shakespeare

Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I think the world is like a great mirror, and reflects our lives just as we ourselves look upon it. Those who turn sad faces toward the world find only sadness reflected. But a smile is reflected in the same way, and cheers and brightens our hearts. You think there is no pleasure to be had in life. That is because you are heartsick and — and tired, as you say. With one sad story ended you are afraid to begin another — a sequel — feeling it would be equally sad. But why should it be? Isn't the joy or sorrow equally divided in life?

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he's a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón