Story The Quotes

#1. I have learned that I am not built for conflict or controversy. I have also learned that, in all my life, I have never chosen a story. The story has always chosen me.

Poe Ballantine

#2. I gave up practically the whole world for you," I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. "The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.

Jandy Nelson

#3. My life is like an O Henry story ... the funniest girl in the world and the boy who never laughs.

Rainbow Rowell

#4. Without the silence that follows the chants, you get only half the story. It's like the climax of a good story. The silence is there because it exists in the music. It just needs to be exposed and acknowledged.

Deva Premal

#5. The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It's a kind of public humiliation.

Stephen Sondheim

#6. The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.

Brene Brown

#7. Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that's overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We've all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.

Joss Whedon

#8. The problem with stereotypes is not because they are untrue, its because they are incomplete; they make one story, the only story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#9. My mother always wanted to be an actress. She was an extra in movies and stuff. I have a feeling this is the classic story: The mother wants to be an actress, and the child ends up doing it. But it was never a jealousy thing between us. It was like - well, I was making my mom happy.

Kristy McNichol

#10. I loved the old stories in National Lampoon, like the original story the movie Vacation was based on. I used to laugh at them until I cried.

Drew Carey

#11. When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.

Kate Klise

#12. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.

Patrick Rothfuss

#13. I know the responsibility that entails from telling a story. The one thing I despise the most is when I go to a movie and I see a whole bunch of lazy actors making me waste my time and money.

Zoe Saldana

#14. When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.

Amish Tripathi

#15. When I read 'The Water Diviner,' I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That's the real arrogance of a director!

Russell Crowe

#16. Teaching is a never-ending story. The work is never over; the job is never done.

Andy Hargreaves

#17. Earlier this week - this is crazy - the country's first marijuana cafe opened up, which not only sells medical marijuana, but also has a restaurant where customers can eat. In a related story, the recession is over.

Conan O'Brien

#18. Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story - the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.

Halldor Laxness

#19. I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.

Henning Mankell

#20. Folk take a battering but, they do; they get born and they get brought up and they get fuckt. That's the story; the cot to the fucking funeral pyre.

James Kelman

#21. Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It's the author's story, the author's voice.

Nikki Giovanni

#22. Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.

John Patrick Shanley

#23. Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.

Franz Grillparzer

#24. There is a natural progression to 'Lost,' and as the story goes forward, it's going to change. It's not a static story. The franchise of 'Lost' is not characters sitting on a beach.

Carlton Cuse

#25. The story the data tells us is often the one we'd like to hear, and we usually make sure that it has a happy ending.

Nate Silver

#26. I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.

Steven Spielberg

#27. the story the Psalms tell is the story Jesus came to complete. It is the story of the creator God taking his power and reigning, ruling on earth as in heaven, delighting the whole creation by sorting out its messes and muddles, its injuries and injustices, once and for all.

N. T. Wright

#28. There's always a parallel story. The paths not taken go on in our heads.

Elisabeth Eaves

#29. I never was the story. The story was the story. Period.

Mike Wallace

#30. I'm an actor. I try to play a character in a really cool story, the very best I can.

Matthew Fox

#31. Well, she had her own sorry self, her own story, the snowflake of her life, but even as a child she had been unimpressed by the breathless adult observation that no two of these were exactly alike. In the first place, she had thought, how does anybody know that? And in the second place, so what?

Jincy Willett

#32. 'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.

Simon McBurney

#33. I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened.

Ted Demme

#34. Honest to God, Story. The bullet didn't kill me, but the way you make me feel might.

Tessa Bailey

#35. That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

Anna Godbersen

#36. But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Diana Gabaldon

#37. Once upon a time--which, when you come to think of it, is really
the only proper way to begin a story--the only way that really
smacks of romance and fairyland--

L.M. Montgomery

#38. Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.

Brene Brown

#39. If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

Catherine Hardwicke

#40. I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Virginia Woolf

#41. I think it is an intelligent story [The Intruders]. You've got adult characters who are in search of some things that are out there that we sense are out there, but we don't have any proof. John's character stumbles into that situation.

Glen Morgan

#42. I was a tremendous fan of the original Kenneth Grahame short story, 'The Reluctant Dragon.'

Tony DiTerlizzi

#43. We are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people, but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story-the one according to Luke, not Dickens-is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.

William Henry Willimon

#44. The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.

John Eldredge

#45. We always knew that we wanted to keep Atlantis off for a while and when it did show up, to make it a big story. The goal for Aquaman was to position him as an A-list character; position him as an important member of the Justice League.

Geoff Johns

#46. In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

Nancy Kress

#47. I think over the course of 14 films, I'm returning to a place that I know to tell a story ... the same way Spielberg returned to fantasy, Lucas returned to the 'Star Wars' saga, or John Ford returned to the western.

Gus Van Sant

#48. I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

David Chase

#49. What makes for a good argument, at bottom, is being more prepared than anyone else in that courtroom, and being willing to fight to tell your client's story - the story of why the right view of the law and my client's interests are one and the same.

Patricia Millett

#50. I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.

Amish Tripathi

#51. Books in the series should be read in the following order. Moon Wreck: First Contact (Short Story) Moon Wreck: Revelations (Short Story) Moon Wreck: Secrets of Ceres (Short Story) The Slaver Wars: Alien Contact (Novel) Moon Wreck: Fleet Academy (Novel) The Slaver Wars: First Strike (Novel)

Raymond L. Weil

#52. Anger is a powerful, transformative emotion, one that can light the fire under us that propels us ever higher. However, the woman wasting time at the grocery story, the man cutting us off, the website that will not load are not the right targets for our energy.

Thomm Quackenbush

#53. A mourner is, perforce, a person with a story. The pity is, how very rarely it gets told.

Christian McEwen

#54. When you direct a movie, you're basically looking at a story, the way you want to look at it. You bring that director's vision, and I'm totally open for that.

Donnie Yen

#55. No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.

Sarah Vowell

#56. The longer the president goes without telling his side of the story, the more unease there will be in the public.

George Stephanopoulos

#57. For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#58. Whether I'm acting or making it, at the end of the day it's telling the story; action, drama. You want the audience to feel it - the story, the action, the scene, or a particular shot. I just keep working on crafting my art, on how to make action movies.

Donnie Yen

#59. Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

Jesse Eisenberg

#60. Everyone today has a story; the world's an archive.

Anne Rice

#61. I had the advantage of reading the book, and when the script was first submitted to me, it was just another gangster story - the east side taking over the west side and all that.

Edward G. Robinson

#62. If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

David Halberstam

#63. I always try to tell the story the best possible way. I create the mood for each scene in a way that the audience feels that they are right there with me and they feel actually in the mood that was right for the scene.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#64. Whatever your story, the world does not need to mould you.

Tim Hughes

#65. With my personal work I prefer not to work from storyboards because being a director, producer and animator in one person I don't have to communicate my idea to anyone else, I can keep the feeling of the story, the story arc and structure in my head.

Signe Baumane

#66. One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear.

Margaret Kennedy

#67. After you've written a story, the thing to do is sell it. Sounds simple, and it is, if one will follow certain basic principles of salesmanship.

Erle Stanley Gardner

#68. As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.

Gail Carson Levine

#69. By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.

Roald Dahl

#70. We need time to relax and enjoy ourselves too, no matter how dark the story. The occasional humorous moment helps with that. That's one of the things that Joss Whedon excels at in his storytelling.

Patrick Rothfuss

#71. The Big Bang, the formation of sars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures - this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.

Ursula Goodenough

#72. Like any true story, the end of the affair is messy and unsatisfactory:

Neil Gaiman

#73. I'd believed in that story, the story of us. It was still there,
that antiquated fairy tale notion. I was older now, though, and it was
time to let the fairy tale go.

Ute Carbone

#74. Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?

Ally Condie

#75. And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.

Russell Brand

#76. At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.

Michael Chabon

#77. I've always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we're in, and forget everything else.

Helen Mirren

#78. I feel like any actor should always be thinking about how to serve the story. The thing to be cautious of is trying to make too much of your 'moment,' or whatever. The story is a lot bigger than you, and you're there to help it along.

Melanie Lynskey

#79. Each arm is intertwined into a story, the story of my life.
The disappointments that I had.
The life lessons learned.
And the pure soul wrenching love that I only dream to find one day.

A.M. Willard

#80. At some point, if you're lucky, you realize you're not the story. You're part of the story. The story is much bigger than you.

Maynard James Keenan

#81. When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

Jeff Bezos

#82. I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who went fishing in the lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky.

Neil Gaiman

#83. We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence,

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#84. The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere.

Geraldine Brooks

#85. Long Gone is the type of book that should come with a warning. It's a compulsively readable, highly addictive story. The ending will leave you breathless.

Karin Slaughter

#86. People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

Marlon Wayans

#87. Having an open dialogue, in any creative atmosphere, is really important to feeling free to tell the story the best way you can.

Nick Jonas

#88. I think the most experimental way to a film is to tell the story the traditional way, because everyone is doing the other thing.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

#89. It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

Jason Aaron

#90. Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

Daniel Kehlmann

#91. You can't summarize a story or a life. The story, the life, is the summary.

Marty Rubin

#92. One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

Dale Peck

#93. I spent the rest of my day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. I felt like a circus knife thrower's target. If I held my mind immobile, I might avoid being hit by the blades whizzing by my head.

Amy Plum

#94. In Lincoln's mind, at least as Lamon interpreted the story, "the illusion was a sign." Both the president-elect and his wife believed it meant he would not only survive his term in office, but four years later win reelection to a second one, only to die before it ended.

Harold Holzer

#95. My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

Amy Bloom

#96. Of the many messages found in the Hanukah story, the one that has always inspired me most is this: with a strong faith in the Almighty, nothing is impossible; and without the help of our Creator, we labor in vain.

Ronald Reagan

#97. Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

Isabel Allende

#98. Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story.The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding.

Tom Robbins

#99. The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I've chosen to follow.

Nicholas Sparks

#100. Marriage isn't a business, co-owned and managed. It's a love story. The most important things we can give our marriage are time and romance, kissing and laughing. Laundry can wait, but a love story needs to be written a little bit every day. WHEN

Shauna Niequist