Top 100 The Old Old Story Quotes
#1. Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.
Frances Power Cobbe
#2. The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.
Neil Gaiman
#3. The Doctor ... told the old ever-new and curious story of the waning of a woman's love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest.
Kate Chopin
#4. There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.
Chew Chia Shao Wei
#5. It's the same old story, all you think about is money.
Rafael Nadal
#6. It is an old story and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts - to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.
C.S. Lewis
#7. We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
Neal Stephenson
#8. I've always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the 'The Oresteia,' and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.
Peter Milligan
#9. The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be ...
Henry James
#10. People come and go in our lives; that's as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever; and that is a fresh saga everytime.
Ivan Doig
#11. The first story I finished was when I was six years old.
J.K. Rowling
#12. And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.
Fish
#13. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.
Dorothy Allison
#14. Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
Victor LaValle
#15. Once upon a time ... " "In the beginning was ... " That's the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives' tale blues riff begins with "Woke up this mornin' ...
Steven Tyler
#16. Don't let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that's happened.
Anne Rice
#17. If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.
Robert McKee
#18. Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#19. I think the best advice I ever got about acting was from my dad, which was, 'If they don't buy the fish on the first toss, throw it back in the wagon and go to the second house.' Which is like an old Jewish fishmongers' story about how you become a successful fish monger.
Lin Shaye
#20. But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.
J.P. Delaney
#21. We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.
Charles Eisenstein
#22. Any time I've taken the mound, it's always been the old Samson-and-Goliath story written about me.
Randy Johnson
#23. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
Tim O'Brien
#24. Yet, if the world were bettered by
My death or story left untold,
I would condemn myself to die
For misdemeanours manifold:
I bring no harm to young or old
Alive or dead, in either case:
A man so needy never rolled
A mountain from its resting place.
Francois Villon
#26. But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. If someone had taken that book out of my hand said, You're too old for this maybe I'd never have believed that someone who looked like me could be in the pages of the book that someone who looked like me had a story.
Jacqueline Woodson
#28. The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.
John Crowley
#29. The award for the craziest story I ever heard goes to an old woman in Chicago who told me that her cat was planning to assassinate the president.
Adam J. Wright
#30. I reinvented myself. I acquired a taste for evil. I found I have a talent for it. And I murdered the old me.
Mark Kirkbride
#31. Our modern world of old story is completely failing humanity. This is the reason that increasing numbers of people have become and are becoming disillusioned from politics. People don't like voting. Whoever you vote, government gets in. Whatever they promise, they never fulfill.
Satish Kumar
#32. I lie on the floor with my head on my books and my feet up on more of my books and stare up at the ceiling with its flystuck old electric fitting and at this point in the story even the ceiling is glorious.
Ali Smith
#33. It's just not working. One nation trying to destroy another, one race trying to destroy another, one religion trying to destroy another - It's the same old story over and over again.
Frederick Lenz
#34. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
Rob Sheffield
#35. Lose this day loitering 'Twill be the same old story, Tomorrow and the next, Even more dilatory. Whatever you would do, Or dream of doing, begin it! Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it. Begin it now.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#36. The EU lacks a story. For previous generations, the peace argument was a sufficient. But what story do I tell my 20-year-old son? How do I explain to him that we need the EU for the future?
Margot Wallstrom
#37. Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.'
Bill Cosby
#38. Recall the old story of the rather refined young man who preferred sex dreams to visiting brothels because he met a much nicer type of girl that way.
Vivian Mercier
#39. I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar.
Josh Hartnett
#40. In the book, I tell the story of seeing old movies when I was young and acting out scenes at home. Now I get scripts, and I act them out.
Eli Wallach
#41. Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.
Richard Siken
#42. And don't give me the same old story:
"We're in Mexico. Pray."
You'd be better off taking a snake rattle.
Carlos Fuentes
#43. Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
Margaret Thatcher
#44. 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
#45. Lucy wondered what it was she had found. A boy who wanted to be a writer. And a family who had picnics under the stars. She felt as if she had lost something. After all, that family now lived only in the pages of an old diary.
Kristin Kladstrup
#46. What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Athol Fugard
#47. What's missing is leadership in the White House. And the story that Barack Obama does tell, forever shifting blame to the last administration, is getting old. The man assumed office almost four years ago - isn't it about time he assumed responsibility?
Paul Ryan
#48. I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
Wilkie Collins
#49. This is a love story. It's about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.
Jonathan Galassi
#50. There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.
Robert A. Heinlein
#51. Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#52. The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it.
Tom Petty
#53. Immigration is a kind of pilgrimage. That's the way I see it. Just to go back to the desert, biblical metaphors, that's the story of great migration right there, the Old Testament.
Ruben Martinez
#54. That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget.
Christian Crews
#55. Aamah would sometimes remind them that the story of an old disputte should be retold only when no aftertaste of bitterness remains upon the tongue.
Catherine M. Wilson
#56. Incorruptibility by money is the old story ... Now it's incorruptibility by media.
Leon Wieseltier
#57. A common question asked of Mr. Fenn was, "How old is the boy?" to which Mr. Fenn's reply, year after year, was, "He has been somewhere between twelve and thirteen since the day I laid eyes on him.
Christopher Daniel Mechling
#58. Bones tell me the story of a person's life - how old they were, what their gender was, their ancestral background.
Kathy Reichs
#59. Entering the house of God to dwell with God, beholding, glorifying and enjoying him eternally, I suggest, is the story of the Bible, the plot that makes sense of the various acts, persons and places of its pages, the deepest context for its doctrines.
L. Michael Morales
#60. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#61. It is gorgeously shot, and Andrew believes that the old school way of making films in the best way. Meaning: you have a story, and you stick to the story. You don't change and alter the story because of people who've invested in it and what to put product in a shot.
Michael Berryman
#62. 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
#63. I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I've been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it, and you want to put it out.
George Clooney
#64. Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.
Jay McInerney
#65. It's the same old story," he would say, years later; "the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.
Tim Wu
#66. Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.
Joseph G. Peterson
#67. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
Allan Gurganus
#68. 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
#69. I changed his name after I saw this old movie at the Snark. It's called Nosferatu, and it's the original Dracula story. It's ten times as scary as the version you see on television. The guy who plays the vampire is really bizarre.
Daniel Pinkwater
#70. I used to have trust with reporters. Give them scoops. Those were the old days. It's very strange, when you give a story and it doesn't come out the right way.
Joe Arpaio
#71. It will be a great story when I'm an old man telling my grandkids that I was once the best player in the world.
Luke Donald
#72. I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.
Julie Orringer
#73. The hardest part of growing old is remembering what it was like when you were young. Alvin in The Straight Story (movie)
Dan Carruthers
#74. The old age old story of Yin & Yang ... Every positive side has a negative side too. Which are you?
Timothy Pina
#75. 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
#76. I think you've all heard my story about my daughter and how we felt Children's Hospital saved her life when she was less than a year old. I won't go through all of the details of that.
Jack Nicklaus
#77. The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.
G. Willow Wilson
#78. There's an old story," he said, "about a saint who once said, 'Even when the Prince of Darkness takes the form of an angel of light, you'll know him by his reptilian tail.
Anne Rice
#79. The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
Ruth Rendell
#80. I didn't read this book
I inhaled it. This a terrific new take on a great old rock n roll story, a clash of the musical titans.
William McKeen
#81. For Keeping the Faith, I looked at [George ] Cukor's old films like The Philadelphia Story, stuff that's hilariously funny and really smart with a cutting critique in the humor, too. With this, when I read it, I was laughing a lot.
Edward Norton
#82. You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.
A.S. Byatt
#83. Big story at the Olympics regarding Michael Phelps. He stepped out with his girlfriend for the first time. She is a 25-year-old model from Los Angeles. Like every other model in L.A., She's dating an older retired guy. What's going on?
Conan O'Brien
#84. And that's the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top
John Ajvide Lindqvist
#85. The differential diagnosis of catatonia According to an old story, there are three different types of baseball umpires. The first says: "I call them lballs and strikes] as they are"; the second says: "I call them as I see them"; and the third says: "What I call them is what they become.
Max Fink
#86. The old buzzard told me his life's story. I only remember that it was interesting and unusual; I've forgotten all the details.
Hermann Hesse
#87. Ashes, ashes." Her whispered words of an old rhyme smashed through the silence as thunder, and in unison, the shadow figures answered.
"We all fall down.
A.F. Stewart
#88. The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#89. I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.
Donald E. Westlake
#90. The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold.
Stephen Harker
#91. It's an old and sad story. The artist lets the bottle or the dope get between him and his art. He spends half his life achieving success and the second half throwing it all away. How many talents have self-destructed before him? How many more will follow in his wake?
H. Joaquin Jackson
#92. Things take us hard, no question.
How do you make it, all the way
from here to morning? I touch
you, made of such nerve
and flare and pride and swallowed tears.
Go home. Come to bed. The skies
look in at us, stern.
And this is an old story.
Adrienne Rich
#93. Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.
Michael Herr
#94. As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.
Stephen Hunter
#95. And so I write this for you, My Sarah. With the hope that one day, when you're old enough, this story that lives with me, will live with you as well. When a story is told, it is not forgotten. It becomes something else, a memory of who we were; the hope of what we can become.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#96. Best day of my life was January 9, 1997. I was eight years old and my mom and I went to the zoo on a class trip. I liked the bears. She liked the monkeys. Best day ever. End of story.
John Green
#97. I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.
Wes Craven
#98. More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.
David Blankenhorn
#99. He snorted. "He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero." None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.
Naomi Novik
#100. It's a different story because guess what, the kid is only 28 years old, 28. He's not his dad, not his grandpa. He's 28 years old.
Dennis Rodman
