Top 70 Quotes About Anecdote
#1. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.
Lionel Shriver
#2. This is the worst of our ways of remembering
this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.
Kamila Shamsie
#3. He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others
Elliot Perlman
#4. Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska ... But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote
Karen Thompson Walker
#5. A popular anecdote described a dog praising perestroika, saying, "My chain is a little longer, the dish is further away, but I can now bark all I want.
Conor O'Clery
#6. Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
Maurice Denis
#7. An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.
Carol Bly
#8. There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.
David Nicholls
#9. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.
Cheryl Strayed
#10. From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
Margaret Halsey
#11. You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.
David Nicholls
#12. What was Aristotle's life?' Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: 'He was born, he thought, he died.' And all the rest is pure anecdote.
Martin Heidegger
#13. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.
Cheryl Strayed
#14. People meeting for the first time suddenly relax if they find they both have cats. And plunge into anecdote.
Charlotte Gray
#15. A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#16. Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75
Chris Bohjalian
#17. Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. Being an entrepreneur, everyone needs to hear a personal anecdote from you once in a while or see you go out of your way to make someone's day. Maybe it's time for a party at your house to unwind, or an afternoon off with the team to attend the ball game.
Martin Zwilling
#19. He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron".
A.A. Milne
#20. Everything I tell her reminds her of some cute anecdote about one of her previous jobs, or previous boyfriends, or previous lives, or her cat, Sparkles, who is mitten-toed and sleeps on her head and can't be trusted on catnip.
Kirt J. Boyd
#21. I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.
John Thorn
#24. Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.
T. S. Eliot
#25. Marsh recounts an anecdote about a psychopath who was being tested with a series of pictures and who failed over and over again to recognize fearful expressions, until finally she figured it out: "That's the look people get right before I stab them.
Paul Bloom
#26. I don't want names, but you have to have bumped into some pretty nasty artists with pretty big chips on their shoulders. I'd like an anecdote about the most obnoxious personality you had the misfortune of working with, albeit as anonymously as you feel comfortable divulging.
Patrick Stump
#27. You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.
Charles Baxter
#28. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#29. A remarkable number of the memoirs of booksellers are basically anecdote delivery devices.
Travis McDade
#30. You must get beyond divertissement, sketch, anecdote, the interesting moment. You must get to the mystery of human personality. What is the line of the story that leads us to a point where we see or intuit something we haven't before?
John L'Heureux
#32. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Irving Howe
#34. Learning by anecdote is risky, but waiting for scientific proof is too.
Guy Kawasaki
#35. The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#36. History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
Thomas Kuhn
#37. Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
Kazimir Malevich
#38. Washing dishes is the anecdote to confusion. I know that for a fact.
Maira Kalman
#39. Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.
Michael Ondaatje
#40. People ask me how to start writing. I tell them that 'Creating Creates Creativity'. Put your notes and outline aside. Start with one anecdote or conversation, and that will lead to another and another. It's the steps, the path, not the final destination that drives the process or writing.
Dick Sederquist
#41. The anecdote was funny, but as my father gazed across the river at the university of his youth, his Russian life was in his eyes.
Paullina Simons
#42. Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.
Sylvie Simmons
#43. I read an anecdote once about a woman from another culture who came to the United States and began to introduce herself as "Busy." It was, after all, the first thing she heard when meeting any American. Hello, I'm Busy - she figured it was part of our traditional greeting,
Kevin DeYoung
#45. I told Sam I could catch Beck. I'm going to build a pit trap using the pit Grace helpfully found by falling into it and bait it with Beck's favorite food, which he helpfully recorded in his journal while telling an anecdote about a kitchen fire.
Maggie Stiefvater
#46. I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
Lydia Davis
#47. (I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
Mark Rothko
#48. Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.
Robert Aris Willmott
#49. Your last letter made me laugh so much, Em, but you should still get out of there because while it's good for gags it's definitely bad for your soul. You can't throw years of your life away because it makes a funny anecdote.
David Nicholls
#50. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]
Alice Munro
#51. A few mistakes do not a fiasco make. Professionals throw them off casually but file them away to reinvent as an endearing anecdote in later presentations. Make them part of the performance! Put them behind you and keep going whatever happens.
Ruth Bonetti
#52. If legislation is truly necessary, one would expect the government to be able to provide proof of this beyond anecdote and speculation. Such proof is the least we can expect before we accept a government restriction of liberty as legitimate.
Randy E. Barnett
#53. Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn't a very good anecdote. I'm better at animal stories.
Dorothy Parker
#54. I have one anecdote about the FBI breaking into an embassy in Washington, and under Hoover, they had this sort of ruse whereby they didn't want to recommend a break-in that might be a big flap and cause all kinds of problems.
Ronald Kessler
#55. If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.
Anthony Holden
#56. Once you've got a big feminist and political justification for talking about how you went round to Benedict Cumberbatch's house and did period all over his sofa, then there's no reason not to tell that anecdote in the middle of a dinner party.
Caitlin Moran
#57. Riposte of "that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical," Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
#58. Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
Mark Rothko
#59. I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.
Jack Zipes
#60. An anecdote is related of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-1683), who, in speaking of religion, said, "People differ in their discourse and profession about these matters, but men of sense are really but of one religion." To the inquiry of "What religion?" the Earl said, "Men of sense never tell it."
Gilbert Burnet
#61. My life is dope and I do dope shit.
Kanye West
#62. [The cats] scamper in front of my legs, causing me to fall and face plant into whatever furniture is closest. They especially like to play this game when I'm carrying piping hot coffee.
Wes Locher
#63. I was fired ignominiously from the Junior School Choir for being so off tune that the choir mistress declared she couldn't even bear to have me mime.
Sara Sheridan
#64. Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man ... To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and RoboCop.
Wes Locher
#65. It wasn't enough that I had to worry about playing well and winning the game, but I also had to deal with possibility that one of my teammates could be dragged off the field by the inhabitants of the mental hospital.
Wes Locher
#66. The first way not to shake hands is executed by receiving someone's hand in yours and proceeding to squeeze it tightly, hurting the other party as if they were responsible for a past death in your family, or your adoption as a child.
Wes Locher
#67. These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.
Anna Funder
#69. Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as 'too long.
Wes Locher
#70. I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
Sara Sheridan
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