Single Story Quotes

#1. With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

Romesh Gunesekera

#2. Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

John Berger

#3. The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden.

Victor Hugo

#4. While my favorite book of short stories is Fredrick Brown's 'Nightmares and Geezenstacks,' my favorite single story is 'Sound of Thunder,' by Ray Bradbury.

James Luceno

#5. Never again will a single story be told as though its the only one.

John Berger

#6. When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#7. You can't pack everything into every single story.

Ryan Grim

#8. How many new discoveries does not a person make when on some high point he ascends but a single story higher.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#9. Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.

Roberto Calasso

#10. Creating one single story often requires experimenting and planning and falling on your literary rear more than once before you find the way that works for your particular tale. The most important issue is to keep on trying until you get it right.

Nancy Lam

#11. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#12. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.

Catherynne M Valente

#13. The post-war American newsroom resembled a vast factory churning out multiple editions through the night. Reporters spent days, sometimes weeks, on a single story.

Lionel Barber

#14. I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.

Gia Coppola

#15. Be grateful for every single person who was part of your story.The ones that hurt you. The ones that helped you. Because they all taught you.

Yasmin Mogahed

#16. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Steven Pinker

#17. That first meeting - the one where the hero and heroine start the slow burn that takes the whole story to turn into true love - is the single most important part of the whole book. Nail it, and you've won yourself readers.

Sarah MacLean

#18. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

Haniel Long

#19. There were so many things Sebastian and I had to work out: we'd both been single for so long that blending our lives together wasn't going to be easy.
I'd promised Sebastian we'd find a way. He deserved to be loved for everything he was. And for whatever crazy reason he had, he loved me, too.

Jane Harvey-Berrick

#20. Better than a meaningless story of a thousand words is a single word of deep meaning which, when heard, produces peace.

Gautama Buddha

#21. Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

Pedro Almodovar

#22. To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single image.

Lynsey Addario

#23. Many people think of the Bible as a book of moral teachings with stories sprinkled through to illustrate the teachings. But it's a lot BETTER THAN THAT ... the Bible is a single true story with teachings sprinkled through to illustrate the story.

Timothy Keller

#24. I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

John Steinbeck

#25. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

Sherwood Anderson

#26. The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried

Sigmund Freud

#27. The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated.

Helen M. Luke

#28. A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

Richard K. Morgan

#29. Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted & still alive?
Who knows this story but the elephants & the trees?

Who says the grace of a black man in motion is not perfect
as a tusk in the sun or a single leaf taking its sweet time to the ground?

Danez Smith

#30. Never gonna forget a single day, baby. Good and bad, they all add up to the story of us. I'm gonna take everyone one and cherish it, come what may.

J.T. Geissinger

#31. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

Louis Menand

#32. Once you start recognizing the truth of your story, finish the story. It happened but you're still here, you're still capable, powerful, you're not your circumstance. It happened and you made it through. You're still fully equipped with every single tool you need to fulfill your purpose.

Steve Maraboli

#33. I hope telling the story of how I went from being a single mom to serving in the Texas State Senate to running for governor will remind others that with the right leadership in government, where you start has nothing to do with how far you go.

Wendy Davis

#34. Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

Don Roff

#35. Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

Norman Lock

#36. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.

Haruki Murakami

#37. 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

#38. I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

Lorrie Moore

#39. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.

William Faulkner

#40. I'd love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn't really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.

Andrew Davies

#41. It's getting a little chilly in here! Why don't we sit by the fireplace and I'll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys!

Angel Ramon Medina

#42. A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ...

Edgar Allan Poe

#43. What we learn from the story of Adam and Eve is simple. What we can have is never what we want. And when we can have what we wanted we want something else. It's human nature in a single luminous story. Our sin. Our fall. Our problem.

R. Joseph Hoffmann

#44. Thus many a melody passed to and fro between the two nightingales, drunk with their passion. Those who heard them listened in delight, and so similar were the two voices that they sounded like a single chant. Born of pain and longing, their song had the power to break the unhappiness of the world.

Nizami Ganjavi

#45. The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.

Malik Bendjelloul

#46. One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story's wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.

Neale Osborne

#47. I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.

Nicolas Roeg

#48. I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.

Story Musgrave

#49. I can't conceive of nursing babies and taking care of children and writing, too. I know there are writers that do that, but I'm too single-minded. I can't stand to be interrupted, whether I'm writing a story or dressing a child.

Ellen Gilchrist

#50. I did not look like my story. I would respond by saying that none of us really do; it is impossible to tell, from a single glance, the journeys someone has traveled, the experiences that have made them who they are.

Steve Pemberton

#51. My family's story isn't special. What's special is the America that makes our story possible. Ours is a nation like no other, a place where great journeys can be made in a single generation. No matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.

Julian Castro

#52. The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

Henry James

#53. If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.

Lynsey Addario

#54. You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

Katherine Center

#55. Civilians are arrested every single day - including innocent ones - and they must wait until their day in court in order to argue their side of the story. Police officers must be subjected to the same rules.

Al Sharpton

#56. There is no single way to serve God, but the point is this: We each have only one life to live to tell a story about Him, about His ways, about His love. And if we are Christ followers, then God calls us to use our gifts, to exercise our faith, and to become salt and light right where we are.

Sally Clarkson

#57. Most of all, I'll remind them each morning that we make a choice to bring positivity or negativity into the world, and that within every single person where lies an extraordinary story waiting to unfold.

Adam Braun

#58. The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights

Gloria Steinem

#59. Everything we see in a Catholic church is there for a single purpose: to tell a love story.

Donald Wuerl

#60. In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story,

Bill Bryson

#61. In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.

Donald Maass

#62. In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Carl Sagan

#63. I read somewhere that every life is the story of a single mistake, and then what happens after.

Andrew Gross

#64. I have always loved him. Every single minute of every single day my heart has belonged to him. I have just run away from the truth. I have covered it in shrouds of friendship and teenage crush.

Aditi Bose

#65. My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.

Cory Booker

#66. Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.

Adam Ross

#67. In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem.

Jeff Britting

#68. Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: 'What did you do that?' Junaid said: 'I was bowing before his single-mindedness. For his aim, that man has given his life.

Idries Shah

#69. The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he'd inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.

David James Duncan

#70. Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

Steven Pressfield

#71. The lyrics to the single 'Survivor' are Destiny's Child's story, because we've been through a lot, ... We went through our drama with the members ... Any complications we've had in our 10-year period of time have made us closer and tighter and better.

Beyonce Knowles

#72. Only a woman could make so much out of so little. Give them a single fact and they'd fashion it into a story before taking a single breath.

Ted Dekker

#73. Just for the sake of amusement, ask each passenger to tell you his story, and if you find a single one who hasn't often cursed his life, who hasn't told himself he's the most miserable man in the world, you can throw me overboard head first.

Voltaire

#74. Never oversimplify yourself by using a single word or category to describe who you are. Take the time to tell your story.

Derek Webb

#75. A lot of cable television is shot on a single camera. Our eyes are more trained to that. It takes the camera off the crane, away from observing the action, to becoming a character in the story along with everyone else. People are getting used to that.

A. J. Bowen

#76. E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

Gabrielle Zevin

#77. I know have lived, so many times, that the only thing I have left to remember is my writing, cause every single moment in life it's already written.

Piroska Rodriguez

#78. Grace is thoughtful. It considers a back-story, an upbringing, the entire person, and not just a tiny single slice of their life.

J.S. Park

#79. A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.

John L'Heureux

#80. You never find yourself involved in a single action story. Your family is always being with you. And you cannot separate whatever is going on in your life with your relationship with your son, with your wife ...

Jose Padilha

#81. I feel 'The Night Circus' has a complete story arc in one book. I like it as a single volume. It feels complete to me, and I wouldn't want to stretch it out into something it's not.

Erin Morgenstern

#82. No thanks. I'm not an artist." "You don't have to be. That's the beauty of creating art. It's cathartic. Think of your past, your present, your future. Draw what troubles you. It can be a face, a place, a story inside of one single image.

Keri Lake

#83. They never understood
one single little thing
of my life.

Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende
Our One Neverending Story

Petra Hermans

#84. The newly released movie 'Noah' features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story.

Aaron Klein

#85. I've always chosen the roles that aren't the direct lead because I like being a very poignant character in the story, rather than being seen in every single seen.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#86. He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot ...

John Gardner

#87. I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.

Chuck Palahniuk

#88. I'll work to ensure that every single refugee who seeks asylum in the United States has a fair chance to tell his or her story. This is the least we can offer people fleeing persecution and devastation.

Hillary Clinton

#89. I loved him the way some people are to be loved - from a distance.

Sanhita Baruah

#90. Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger. We would see Facebook on every single laptop in class. We knew there was a bigger story here.

Dustin Moskovitz

#91. The world of global drug production, shipping distribution, sales, and consumption is too complex, however, to be understood in any single us-and-them story.

John Gibler

#92. After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Dan Simmons

#93. So, Don't Mix Up Your Way To Write Your Life Story With Others, Then Definitely It Won't Sell. You Only Know What You're Encountering In Every Single Step. Everyone's Shoes Won't Fit In Your Feet ...

Muhammad Imran Hasan

#94. I think 'Overlord' has definitely benefited because I work with every single level designer, and working where we have space to tell the story. That's what it's all about - getting writers and storytellers involved in the team and being a back and forth process.

Rhianna Pratchett

#95. Mine is a story about a teenage single mother who struggled to keep her young family afloat. It's a story about a young woman who was given a precious opportunity to work her way up in the world. It's a story about resiliency, and sacrifice, and perseverance. And you're damn right it's a true story.

Wendy Davis

#96. A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other.

Steven Millhauser

#97. There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?

Susan Barker

#98. Then his beautiful lips touched hers. A fluttering of wings, a cry of angels, a single beat of two hearts.

Chris Lange

#99. Every single person has a story that will break your heart. And if you're paying attention, many people ... have a story that will bring you to your knees. Nobody rides for free.

Brene Brown

#100. If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.

Octavia Butler