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Quotes About Story

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it's the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story.
~ Rosemary Clement-Moore
Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.
~ Rosemary Sullivan
It was a story that still hurt in the telling, which perhaps made it a worthwhile gift, after all.
~ Rosemary Sutcliff
I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.
~ Rosemary Sutcliff
We loved—and were fated to sorrow. But from our striving and from our sorrow we fashioned The Oldest Story in the World.
~ Ross Lockridge, Jr.
Plural ha sido la celeste historia de mi corazón...
~ Ruben Dario
Every great narrative contains its end in its beginning and its beginning in its end,
~ Rudolf Arnheim
And what of the men who made love to the woman who became La Llorona? Did they every cry for their children? It doesn't seem fair to have only her suffer, only her crying and doing penance. Perhaps a man should run with her, and in our legends we would call him "El Mero Chingón," he who screwed up everything. Then maybe the tale of love and passion and the insanity it can bring will be complete. Yes, I think someday I will write that story.
~ Rudolfo Anaya
I never consciously think of writing a so-called Christian novel. I don't think Albert Camus ever thought of writing an existentialist novel, either. I think of getting at, of building, a story.
~ Rudy Wiebe
what were my impressions upon viewing for the first time the manor where you'd had me brought? My initial thought was "Toad Hall." This was, of course, an inadequate comparison but the best I could muster considering the limited number of books I'd read that centered on soaring Gothic structures. (As a boy, I went nine pages into The Hunchback of Notre Dame before realizing it wasn't a football story.)
~ Rupert Holmes
Every journalist has a novel inside him, which is an excellent place for it.
~ Russell Lynes
My life has become a story. One day your life with become a story too. All we can do is have faith that life leads us where it does for a reason, so we can learn things we didn't know about ourselves. One day you will look back on your suffering and you will find a meaning for it and that will be your story" -Baba
~ Ruth Behar
Even such is time, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age, and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days. And from which earth and grave and dust, The Lord will raise me up I trust. —Sir Walter Ralegh's poetry
~ Marc Aronson
Es tonto quien intenta borrar sus cicatrices en lugar de leerlas.
~ Marcelo Birmajer
the story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, the story of Jesus becomes a disclosure of God, the revelation and epiphany of God. As a
~ Marcus J. Borg
I see Mark's passion story as the earliest. Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark, and I see the additions that they made to Mark's passion story as imaginative elaborations.30 I have no opinion about whether John's passion story shows knowledge of Mark or whether it is completely independent. Thus I see Mark as the foundational narrative, and I turn now to comments about the main elements of his story of the passion.
~ Marcus J. Borg
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
~ Margaret Atwood
The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story.
~ Margaret Atwood
I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. I've tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?
~ Margaret Atwood
That room has been static for me so long: an emptiness. a void. a silence containing an unheard story ready for me to unlock. Let there be plot.
~ Margaret Atwood
Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then, said Oryx more softly. Why are you so angry? I don't buy it, said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up? You don't buy what? Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap. If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy, said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, what is it that you would like to buy instead? (167)
~ Margaret Atwood
Si sólo es un cuento, parece menos espantoso.
~ Margaret Atwood
But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story. I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.
~ Margaret Atwood
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song.
~ Margaret Atwood