Top 100 Story Not Quotes
#1. Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.
C.S. Lewis
#2. No ancient story, not even Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, has remained as popular through the course of time. The story of Rama appears as old as civilization and has a fresh appeal for every generation.
David Frawley
#3. Certainly, it includes that. I want the story to be interpreted in as many ways as possible, and of course, the bad blood aspect of it included. For instance, perhaps this is a story not about the hereditary nature of evil, but rather you could interpret it from a different perspective, too.
Park Chan-wook
#4. I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.
Lydia Davis
#5. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.
Daniel Kahneman
#6. Judas is a reflection of anyone who ends up rejecting Jesus. It's a tragic story?not something to shake your finger at, but something to be sad about.
Darrell Bock
#7. We always fall in love with a story, not a name or a body but what is inscribed in the man.
Susana Fortes
#9. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism.
Brene Brown
#10. As a writer, I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that's the most important thing my readers should know - I'm all about the story, not about the ego.
Simon Toyne
#11. I'm a slave to the beats of the story, not to the words we use to tell the story.
Steve Dildarian
#12. Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
C.S. Lewis
#13. When people seek to undermine your dreams, predict your doom or criticize you, remember that they are telling you their story, not yours.
Cynthia Occelli
#14. The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.
Joseph Boyden
#15. There is an appropriate way to use your story, not as an excuse but as a testimony to God's ability to free you from the past.
Andy Stanley
#16. You're saying we can write our own destiny," I said, feeling too jaded and stubborn in the moment to believe it.
"I am saying," he said carefully, "that this is not the end of the story. Not the way I am writing it.
Karina Halle
#17. Gender has always been considered a fact immutable. But we now know it's actually more fluid, complex, and mysterious. Because of my success, I never have the courage to share my story. Not because I thought what I am is wrong but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free.
Geena Rocero
#18. Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.
Tate Linden
#19. You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.
Francesca Lia Block
#20. In my books I try to tell a good story, not give messages.
Avi
#21. Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
#22. Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
Sara Zarr
#23. A folklore study differs from most writing, in that the tale is told in the voice of the individual telling the story, not by the collector.
Karen Jones Gowen
#24. It's important to remember the Gospel is a story; not a set of bullet points.
Timothy Keller
#25. Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.
Phillip E. Johnson
#26. The place I begin is with story. If the audience doesn't care about that, then it doesn't matter how amazing the spectacle is. My central philosophy is that people go to the movies to be told a story, not to see stuff blow up.
Jonathan Mostow
#27. A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.
Mary Lascelles
#28. The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.
J. Gresham Machen
#29. It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.
Warren Spector
#30. My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work.
Jeffrey Jones
#31. I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.
G. Willow Wilson
#32. For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation. (63)
Sheldon B. Kopp
#33. The Christian faith grew through story - not text. Only later did the stories become Scripture. While the Scripture must be held in the highest regard, we must not neglect the power of story.
Erwin McManus
#34. I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story of many girls.
Malala Yousafzai
#35. It gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#36. I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.
Sarah Paulson
#37. And we need to share our story. Not with everyone but with someone. There is someone who is like you were. And he or she needs to know what God can do. Your honest portrayal of your past may be the courage for another's future.
Max Lucado
#38. The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story.
Richard D. Zanuck
#39. I'm drawn to a good story, really, as I hope most people are. For me, it's the story that's going to stay with you eventually, not necessarily the genre. I go to watch a film because of the story, not because it was a Western or a comedy.
Ryan Kwanten
#40. All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
Orson Scott Card
#41. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly: That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. I write novellas, short books, whatever. I set out to write a good story not write a dictionary.
Jason E. Hodges
#43. We chose Fox Way. We made it, Calla and Persephone and I. But it's only your origin story, not your final destination.
Maggie Stiefvater
#44. I went to Paris in 1989 when the Americans didn't quite know what to do with me at first. Now, all those years later, it's kind of the same story. Not the same scenario, but kind of the same story.
Lenny Kravitz
#45. I tell my story, not because its unique, but because its not, it is the story of many girls
Malala Yousafzai
#46. Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end?
Lee Smith
#47. I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.
Michael Winter
#48. I know from experience that I make the best decisions when I'm into the story and inspired by the story, not when I'm sitting there trying to plot.
Pamela Clare
#49. The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.
Jim Harrison
#50. It's not that there is no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not because it's necessarily the most absolutely truthful, but because it's a thing that we tell ourselves makes sense of the world, at least at this moment.
Michael Kimmelman
#51. I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things ... One wants to open the story, not close it.
Anish Kapoor
#52. I don't deserve a love story. Not anymore. Love stories aren't written for girls who could do what I just did to my brother, for girls with black hearts.
Jandy Nelson
#53. Sometimes you can have a great scene but if just doesn't need to be in the movie. If it's not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it's not purposefully serving a breath - it has got to go.
Kevin Feige
#54. I have long had a theory Bill Clinton-Hillary Clinton relationship. Not how they met, not that story, not the courtship or any of that. But how it happened that this once-in-a-lifetime woman.
Rush Limbaugh
#55. We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators.
Matt Walsh
#57. You don't pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking - the story's going to die on its feet.
Ray Bradbury
#58. Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything. Once you say the character is in love, he can do the craziest thing that nobody would do who's not in love. Once you're in love, you have that excuse to go and do whatever you want.
Josh Hutcherson
#59. In their efforts to provide a sufficiency of water where there was not one, men have resorted to every expedient from prayer to dynamite. The story of their efforts is, on the whole, one of pathos and tragedy, of a few successes and many failures
Walter Prescott Webb
#60. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#61. Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep.
John O'Hara
#62. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Flannery O'Connor
#63. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Tim Cahill
#64. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.
Flannery O'Connor
#65. The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Eric Ries
#66. Well, how did you die, then?" the old man finally asked.
"Die?" Matthew threw back. "Are you crazy? I'm not dead. I'm just very late.
J. Tonzelli
#67. If this is a sad story, don't tell it to me tonight.'It is not sad,' she said. 'Only some things happen and are there for always even though you forget why or when.
Jean Rhys
#68. Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.
Glen Duncan
#69. The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.
Story Musgrave
#70. The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Paul Auster
#71. They are young, full of ambition and dreams; they are still unable to imagine that there might be a story in the world in which they are not the main characters.
Juan Gomez Barcena
#72. I'm not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.
Sarah Sutton
#73. I'm not even that upset about the rejection any more. What bothers me most is that I haven't got to the end of my story, and I can't start over with someone else, it's too hard.
Paula Hawkins
#74. Studios, to cut through the clutter, want recognisable titles. But that does not excuse you, as a writer, from having an original story.
Roberto Orci
#75. ..love is as complex an emotion as exists. There are many reasons why love does not prosper.
.. the waters are perilous, and you would do well to know that, because unlike your novels, not every story has a happy ending.
Mary Lydon Simonsen
#76. I'm working on my life story. I'm not decided if it's going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.
Dolly Parton
#77. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
Mark Twain
#78. My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.
Wynonna Judd
#79. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#80. The story of money is very funny. Others burn what we earn. Why not give as we live, so the world will cry when we die. -RVM
R.v.m.
#81. About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.
Lois Tilton
#82. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.
Ira Sachs
#83. Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
Bonnie Friedman
#84. There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
Edward Zwick
#85. I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.
Julie Orringer
#86. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.
Robert Kurson
#87. I just know that when I go onstage, I give everything I have, not only my feet, not only my legs, not only my body. I try to tell a story. Sometimes I am able to cry because I feel like it. Sometimes I am able to love because I feel like it.
Sylvie Guillem
#88. Without compassion, we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much judgment, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else.
Deena Metzger
#89. When readers close the covers on 'Running the Rift,' I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.
Naomi Benaron
#90. From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.
Jacqueline Woodson
#91. For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
Philip Pullman
#92. We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story ...
Mary Oliver
#93. We like things to manifest right away, and they may not. Many times, we're just planting a seed and we don't know exactly how it is going to come to fruition. It's hard for us to realize that what we see in front of us might not be the end of the story.
Sharon Salzberg
#94. And if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that cool props and special effects are not enough. Story comes first. Everything depends on story.
Patrick Rothfuss
#95. I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little
Octavio Paz
#96. I never had a story for the sequels, for the last trilogy. That's not really part of the plan at this point, and I'll be at the age where to do another trilogy would take 10 years. I'd always envisioned it as six movies. When you see it in six parts you'll understand that it really ends at part six.
George Lucas
#97. Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.
Bryn Greenwood
#98. Judge tenderly, if you must. There is usually a side you have not heard, a story you know nothing about, and a battle waged that you are not having to fight.
Traci Lea LaRussa
#99. Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story
it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story.
L.M. Montgomery
#100. Like JJ Abrams, creators just want to tell a story and entertain people. So why only focus in one way of telling it?Give readers another way to connect with your story. Entertainment does not need to be contained in one medium. Think about telling your story in many mediums.
Anne-Rae Vasquez
