The Only Story Quotes

#1. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

Italo Calvino

#2. You know, I like to think my life is kind of like the books I read, only I'm the author. I can write the story I want. The future can be anything I want it to be." He moved his head side to side, considering my words. "That works, as long as your story has a blond stud that fucks like an animal.

Adriana Locke

#3. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.

Cesar Aira

#4. Your story isn't powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#5. 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

#6. The happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

Karen Joy Fowler

#7. William Faulkner said, "The only story worth telling is that of the human mind in conflict with itself".

Miles Skedsvold

#8. The story of Genesis could only be a poorly written misconception that put needless blame on women. Estella

Ira Smith

#9. You can only succeed. You cannot fail. Failure is impossible; it is an illusion. Nothing is a failure. Nothing. Everything moves the human story, and hence the process of evolution, forward. Everything advances you on your journey.

Neale Donald Walsch

#10. 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

#11. beneath the stars that drift; she sighed and said
"Every tale of a love
can only be a tale of ghosts that linger
in these spaces we
can never hold," - as the wind
gave echo

John Daniel Thieme

#12. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Jeanette Winterson

#13. I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little

Octavio Paz

#14. There is a story I always tell my students ... when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn't speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word "exit" which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :"No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success

Pablo

#15. When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are
more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story
one after the other. It is queer.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#16. Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship - a great story!

James MacGregor Burns

#17. In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.

Pablo Neruda

#18. The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

Jen Pollock Michel

#19. Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters.

Subhan Zein

#20. Keep in mind that the only person to write for is yourself.Tell the story you most desperately want to read.

Susan Isaacs

#21. If someone would have asked him to describe that moment, he would have failed miserably. The only thing he knew was this is how it felt to love and be loved in return. Till now love as a feeling was alien to him but tonight he had witnessed its definitions in the most profound manner ever possible.

Namrata

#22. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

Julian Fellowes

#23. If your life is a blank page, that only means you have room to write your story. You have the power to tell that story the way you want to.

Thea Harrison

#24. The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.

Jayne Ann Krentz

#25. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.

Kerry Washington

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

John Berger

#27. For me, the only ego that needs serving in putting together a film is the story's, the ego of the story and it's the piece itself that you want to bring out the voice of the piece. You're really serving that and that's the thing that you have a basic understanding of.

Julia Ormond

#28. There was a story etched in each wrinkle on his forehead-the stories any long life can amass but that only a lonely life locks forever.

Ashay Abbhi

#29. Be the hero of your children's story. Never let them believe for a minute that honor, courage and doing what is right is only reserved for other fathers and mothers.

Shannon L. Alder

#30. She'd known it her whole life. It was the one thing she was certain of. That someday, everyone she loved would die. Everything she loved would crumble to ruin. It was the price of life. It was the price of love. It was the only ending for every true story.

Martha Brockenbrough

#31. Whenever I work on a film, I have three rules. Only three and I tell them to every screenwriter. I say let's retain the spirit and the intent of the overall story. Let's make it the best film that we possibly can.

Nicholas Sparks

#32. A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.

Matthew J. Kirby

#33. If there's no one else to tell another side - the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true. (p. 173)

Heidi W. Durrow

#34. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.

Elizabeth Held Forsyth

#35. Whatever you do, you'll never kill my love. I love you! It's only now that I realize I can't imagine my life without you

Natalie Ansard

#36. There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.

Peter Landesman

#37. Every story has two sides. So far, we've only heard one. The stupid side." LIFE

Alexander McCall Smith

#38. Moments ... there are always moments where a decision has to be made. In mortal life there is always a choice. One road or another? The ultimate choose your own adventure story. In the clans, there is only one option, and that is to do whatever your clan's oracle tells you to do.

Kim Cormack

#39. The psychiatrist's office: the only place I can be sure my story will be treated as sad, but interesting.

Mason Cooley

#40. About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending." - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life

Norman Sunshine

#41. I love to hear the story of how stars sacrifice their life to receive only one memorable kiss from the Earth.

Harshada Pathare

#42. It's important for little girls to know not every story has to be a love story and for boys to know that soldiers aren't the only ones to triumph in war.

Guillermo Del Toro

#43. The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

Stewart O'Nan

#44. There was also no character arc. Change only comes when we face the difficulty of reality head-on. Fantasy changes nothing, which is why, once we're done fantasizing, it feels like a bankrupt story.

Donald Miller

#45. If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

Nell Freudenberger

#46. It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

Rob Reiner

#47. They only the victory win,
Who have fought the good fight and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight
if need be, to die.

William Wetmore Story

#48. But hey, it's only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.

Junot Diaz

#49. To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.

Virginia Woolf

#50. You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.

William Finnegan

#51. Not only is your story your truth, your story is going to be the platform and the foundation for everything that's getting ready to happen in your life.

DeVon Franklin

#52. You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Ann Beattie

#53. The romantic love story is a paradoxical fusion of two extraordinarily potent messages. The first is that love, deep connection, is the most important, indeed the only truly important matter in the world. And the second is that true love cannot exist in this world.

Terrence Real

#54. The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.

Don Miguel Ruiz

#55. If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

Nancy Kress

#56. If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.

Rivka Galchen

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

John Berger

#58. The images in a picture book are the driving forces that tell the story. The words tell only what the pictures can't.

Dan Yaccarino

#59. True storytellers write not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story.

John Freeman

#60. In the only love story he ever attempted, "Kiss Me Again," he had written, "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time." The moral at the end of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

Kurt Vonnegut

#61. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

Steven Johnson

#62. Here is the story of how I died. I wish it were a glamorous story; sadly, there was little glamour in my death. The end for everyone is much the same, sad, lonely, and cold. Only, most people don't wake up again, I did. And I was hungry, so bloody hungry.

L.A. Kennedy

#63. Perfect endings... they don't exist, 'Phie. Only in stories, where nothing ever really changes. Here, right now, isn't a story. There is no happy ending, because it's not the end. Do you understand?

Joe Ducie

#64. There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you.

James S.A. Corey

#65. In a 1931 speech, Butler recounted a story about Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, how he had run over a child with his car, and said, as he moved on, "It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of the State.

Smedley D. Butler

#66. The pieces don't fit perfectly together and don't tell the whole story. Only the viewer can say if I succeeded.

Susan Juby

#67. There's only one story, the story of your life.

Helen Keller

#68. Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven't you ever heard a story about Koschei? He's only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!

Catherynne M Valente

#69. My only want and wish, really, was to tell a good story. I wanted to do good work, tell a good story, and give the character a voice. Those were my only expectations.

Uzo Aduba

#70. We know the story of the Deluge from the Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it is the same today.

Wilm Hosenfeld

#71. Do the story in the way it really demands to be done, which may mean using several different styles or only one style; but it's still about respecting the story.

Bill Sienkiewicz

#72. The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#73. My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Edward Abbey

#74. Vomiting isn't bad either, take note. It is, in certain more obvious respects, a show of force. I have always liked this story 'A man holding with one hand to a one-way sign is vomiting into the gutter, another man goes past near him and tells him: "If you only knew how much I agree with you.

Jean Fremon

#75. The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.

Octavia E. Butler

#76. I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Dorothy Allison

#77. As you begin to look deeply into the mystery of your own evolution, in place of good and evil you will find only stories, finished or unfinished.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#78. And you, Prince Elric?" She attracted the albino's wandering attention. "Do you know his story?"
Elric shook his head.
"I only know," he said, "that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!

Michael Moorcock

#79. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#80. I cannot write to anyone outside myself
if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.

Shannon Hale

#81. In a fairy tale, the story can't be altered. The prince and princess will never have a fight. You'll never hear the queen raise her voice. No on ever gets sick; no one ever gets hurt. Maybe love is only safe in places where it can't change.

Jodi Picoult

#82. By accepting what the external structures have told us we need to do, we have given the power of our realities and ourselves to others. It is time to tell a new story for women, and that can only start with women.

Zainab Salbi

#83. The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Mike Nichols

#84. Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

Rob Manuel

#85. You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.

K.H. Rennie

#86. The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos.

John Dunn

#87. Aster was eager for any kind of
Chance. She had only wanted a chance. A way out, a greater story than the one that had been written for her, just like I had wanted. Tell my bapa I tried, Miz. A chance to control her own destiny. But for her, escape was impossible.

Mary E. Pearson

#88. I feel like the only reason we're able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, 'discovery' means you don't know the answer when you start.

Ed Catmull

#89. 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

#90. Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

Anita Shreve

#91. The only way to survive eternity is to be able to appreciate each moment -daniel grigori (fallen)

Daniel Grigori

#92. I think we're moving at the pace we were set to move in. That, not everyone lives to the same expectations in life and love. And we can only hope that the love we feel is the love we were meant to share. -Angelic Pierce

A. Lee Dright

#93. The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

Byron Katie

#94. 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

#95. When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

George Washington

#96. We heard recently the touching story of a young flier who was killed in action. Before he died, he had time to scrawl only a few words as a brief final message to his parents back home. The note read: "Dear Mom and Pop; I had time to say my prayers. Jack."

James Keller

#97. Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

Anais Nin

#98. Scars are badges of strength and courage. They tell the story of what we have endured. Only survivors wear them.

Kaki Warner

#99. I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

John Grisham

#100. Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

Arthur C. Clarke