Top 100 Dark Story Quotes
#1. In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.
Nancy Pearl
#2. In Lakefield View, everybody has a secret. Behind every smile lies a dark story. Behind every hello is a hidden goodbye.
Gavin Hetherington
#3. I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.
Alan Furst
#5. 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 into a dark room.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#6. His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair - a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad for five years hence.
Solange Nicole
#7. Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.
Nathan Wolfe
#8. It's almost like these games are the modern day comic books, especially when you play Alone in the Dark. There's a real story that goes along with it and a movie seemed like the right kind of transition to make.
Christian Slater
#9. Some dark nights hide the cruelest of secrets. Such are the tales of the dark shadows hidden in that old castle in a distant land. The story of ages started with a classic; highlighting the infamous monster made out of a man.
Adhish Mazumder
#10. I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?
Peter Orner
#11. Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.
Dan Chaon
#12. I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.
Karen Russell
#13. Why would you save me?
Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.'
- A Tale of Despereaux, Kate Dicamillo - P. 81
Kate DiCamillo
#14. Of all the things I've done, the first 'Strongman' story was one of the easiest things to write. It was almost fully formed from the get-go. It's almost a 'Dark Knight Returns' riff, except you have a battle-worn Mexican wrestler instead of Batman.
Charles Soule
#15. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.
Bill Johnson
#16. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
Alice McDermott
#17. Mum just laughed gleefully at his mounting frustration, like the villainous matriarch in a Roald Dahl story. I suspect a TV guide would describe her idea of comedy as 'dark', or, at very best, 'alternative'.
Matthew Crow
#18. Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.
Marty Rubin
#20. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
#21. I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark
Stephen Hawking
#22. I've been reading scripts where they've been doing a lot of singing now, but within the dark, realistic story line. I would love, love, love, love to do that. But not a musical on Broadway, I don't have that kind of energy or stamina.
Alia Shawkat
#23. The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
Michael Chabon
#24. The story of humans is the story of ideas that shine light into dark corners.
Jill Tarter
#25. I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.
Daniel Handler
#26. We hit every jazz and blues club on and off Bourbon Street, dancing and drinking until we girls were drunk enough to go with the boys to the strip clubs which outnumbered all other businesses in the French Quarter. Here is where my solution unfolded.
Darwun St. James
#27. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
Paul Auster
#28. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#29. So, funny story. There are fairies? In the Dark Woods. And I might have pissed off their king."
There was silence. Then, "Of course you did.
T.J. Klune
#30. Father lied.
The knowledge tasted bitter on her tongue. She folded the
orb into a scarf she'd brought. It didn't conceal its light, but it was
better than carrying the orb through the halls exposed.
Jennifer M. Zeiger
#31. The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn't seen in a long time, passion.
Suzan Battah
#32. Everyone's always interested in a dark theme, especially when there's humor connected to it. It seems like that helps, if that's an integral and organic part of the whole story.
Robert De Niro
#33. Every Great Story deserves a Great Ending and
'The Dark Knight Rises' is our Attempt to give that GREAT story, a GREAT ENDING.
Christopher Nolan
#34. Albert J. Guerard has justly
called the story "one of the great dark meditationsin literature, and one of the purest expressions of a melancholy temperament.
Hunt Hawkins
#35. The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.
G.K. Chesterton
#36. There's some real dark days where you just feel like the story is falling apart in every one. Just keep moving forward, even when you are bluffing, even when you don't quite know what is going to happen next.
Dan Scanlon
#37. 'American Horror Story' is dark, so you shouldn't be expecting too much happiness.
Taissa Farmiga
#38. My lord, I'd rather be alone."
His smile vanished. Not a single muscle in his body bulged, but the color of his eyes turned to dark ashes.
"And I'd rather not.
Chris Lange
#39. To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.
Brennan Manning
#40. This is not a story for the faint of heart; this is the story of one woman's very real struggle through a world against her, the people who hurt her, her real life demons and the people who showed her that every gray sky, no matter how dark, has a sun waiting to break through.
S.L. Jennings
#41. Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.
Haruki Murakami
#43. Drifting on the black, rippling surface were fingers. Thumbs. Dozens of them. Hundreds, floating like dead fish in a dynamited pond. I saw part of an ear. The lights went out.
Glen Hirshberg
#44. We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.
Shauna Niequist
#45. Make up a story ... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison
#46. If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.
Donald Miller
#47. I wonder if there is a dark side to every great love story. With great love comes great hurt. I wonder if it is inevitable.
Sarah Jio
#48. Chilling Tales For Dark Nights, these people or let's say these team is trying to return the fear, the theater... Which so far is great to hear, acting in reading a story and everything one place, just awesome,
Deyth Banger
#49. Don't be sorry. You could hurt me a thousand different ways and I'd love it every time.
Heather Crews
#50. In time, all will be well - for all of us."
"You sound as if you truly believe that it will."
"Why shouldn't I? For Arman has given us the end of the story, has he not? Shamayim will be a wonderful home, even if this one remains dark.
Jill Williamson
#51. He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.
Christopher Buehlman
#52. Perhaps the story of the human race is best understood as a journey through particularly hazardous terrain, in the dark, in a not very well-serviced vehicle, with a succession of drivers of varying competence, in assorted states of inebreiation
Cyril Aydon
#53. I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
Lisa Unger
#54. There are no endings for any of us, happy or
otherwise, until we die. A fairy tale only ends
happily because that's the point where the
storyteller stops telling the story.
Lilly Gayle
#55. Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?
Mitch Albom
#56. Old things tell a story, Mr. Gilchrist, just as the lives of people do,' Miss Iverness's dark eyes were fixed intently on him. 'They preserve the past and remind us of how far we have come.
Sarah E. Ladd
#57. Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
Walter Raleigh
#58. During the course of a day, some dark feeling comes, maybe some sadness comes, some thrill, some great happiness, some strange humor. Cinema can embrace all that in one story, just as the story of life.
David Lynch
#59. In the dark you looked so human in your skin that I called you human in my head and didn't want you then and felt relieved: a love story.
Melissa Broder
#60. Did I actually reach out my arms
toward it, toward paradise falling, like
the fading of the dearest, wildest hope-
the dark heart of the story that is all
the reason for its telling?
Mary Oliver
#61. The word 'fairy' conjures up images of cute little creatures, so I don't use it. I use 'metahominids' from the Greek for 'other' and 'men.' They aren't cute - this is no fairy story.
F.R. Maher
#62. I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.
Ed Greenwood
#63. Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.
Michael Morpurgo
#64. If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I'm comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in the dark.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#65. The world is dark, and light is precious.
Come closer, dear reader.
You must trust me.
I am telling you a story.
Kate DiCamillo
#66. Each story, novel, poem and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we're going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#67. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world
Stephen King
#68. He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.
Leanna Renee Hieber
#69. We'll see, Grigori thought as he drifted off to sleep. Brave words came easily in the dark. Daylight might tell a different story.
Ken Follett
#70. I told you. I've been watching." She twirled, her arms outstretched. "Watching, watching, watching.
A.F. Stewart
#71. I will tell you a story, one I used to tell to a little boy with dark hair. A silent boy who rarely laughs, who listened more closely than I realized. A boy who had a name and not a title
Leigh Bardugo
#72. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness.
Neil Gaiman
#73. I love to be scared. Not, 'Hey, I think I smell smoke ... ' scared, but creepy, paranoid, what's-that-out-there-in-the-dark, ghost story scared. It's no surprise that I was the girl who got invited to the slumber parties because I could be counted on to tell a tale to scare the bejesus out of you.
Libba Bray
#74. If I was good at marketing, I'd spin you an empty story that sounds profound. But the truth is that we're all just stumbling around in the dark. Sometimes we hit something terrible.
Susan Ee
#75. The story was a sleeping girl in a narrow bed Dark hair thick and wild and twisted like seaweed across the pillow ... Bella's Lullaby
Stephenie Meyer
#76. Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?
Chuck Palahniuk
#77. San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.
Christopher Moore
#78. In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.
John Lahr
#79. You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.
David Lynch
#80. Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.
Pat Conroy
#81. I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of that tradition.
Eric Stoltz
#82. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.
Jodi Picoult
#83. For DC, I'm working on the new 'Red Lanterns' and 'JLA Dark.' Both of these are very different books, which is great for me. I've heard 'JLA Dark' described as a team of people with supernatural powers - but that's only half the story.
Peter Milligan
#84. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
Tim O'Brien
#85. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.
Kate DiCamillo
#86. Fuck your fairytale. I just want you. I'll make my own God damn happily ever after. But you're the one who is mistaken. You'll be at the end of that story, beautiful. You either come willingly or you force me into the dark after you. It doesn't matter to me, because either way, I'll find you.
Aly Martinez
#87. I didn't want to be the woman who gave herself over willingly to the first man to notice her. I didn't want to be the stupid girl in every novel who loved without question and entered relationships that didn't make sense.
Destinee Hardwick
#88. She swallows and looks down at her hands clenched in her lap. "I don't like this story." "Should I jump to the ending? Spoiler alert: the hero saves her." Tabby looks over at me, her eyes shining like gems in the dark. "A real hero would teach the princess how to save herself.
J.T. Geissinger
#89. Shortly after we were in bed I began my story, but made it so absurd, so long, and so tiresome, that, as my intention was, I sent her to sleep, and should have gone to sleep myself - but dark plots are ever wakeful. ("The Story of Prince Barkiarokh")
William Beckford
#90. His tone dripping condescension, Lothaire crooned, "Ah children, it's not yet story time." He closed his eyes and turned away, saying over his shoulder, "To anyone who contemplates even nearing me while I sleep: I will garrote you with your own viscera.
Kresley Cole
#91. A flower's happy ending is in the sun, but its real story took place in the dark.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#93. That's all childhood is, after all: strong arms to hold back the dark, a story to keep the shadows dancing, and a candle to mark the long journey into day.
Seanan McGuire
#94. We're not here to discuss Maleficent! Her story is too long and complicated to debate in the time we have left...
Serena Valentino
#95. No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.
Josh Radnor
#97. In 'Snow White and the Hunstman,' when we see them in the Dark Forest, you're allowed a lot of freedom to be able to cutaway to, for instance, the prince. That B and C story stuff helps the writing process, even though it makes it a more complicated movie.
Evan Daugherty
#98. They sat close to each other, and he told her a story about her eyes. They were beautiful dark lakes in which her thoughts swam about like mermaids. And her forehead was a snowy mountain, grand and shining. These were lovely stories.
Hans Christian Andersen
#99. Where dark woods hide secrets and mountains are fierce and bold. Deep waters hold reflections of times lost long ago. I will heed every story, take hold of my own dream. Be as strong as the sea is stormy, be as proud as an eagle's scream.
Julie Fowlis
#100. What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ...
Joy Williams
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