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Quotes About Story

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...
~ Joseph Conrad
The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.
~ Joseph Conrad
It was only after I had finished writing the first part that the whole story revealed itself to me in its tragic character and in the march of its events as unavoidable and sufficiently ample in its outline to give free play to my creative instinct and to the dramatic possibilities of the subject
~ Joseph Conrad
Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and won fist fights with Huple's cat.
~ Joseph Heller
Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next.
~ Joseph Heller
That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.
~ Josephine Hart
The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.
~ Joy Harjo
Breath is our entrance into story making—it is a promise. It is a constant ritual that we all share, and it is essential in poetry.-Joy Harjo
~ Joy Harjo
I leave you to your ceremony of grieving Which is also of celebration Given when an honored humble one Leaves behind a trail of happiness In the dark of human tribulation. None of us is above the other In this story of forever.
~ Joy Harjo
Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth's mind are connected.
~ Joy Harjo
Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to survive?
~ Joy Harjo
Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff. This is the first world, and the last.
~ Joy Harjo
How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story .
~ Joyce Carol Oates
At least, Mother said, that's the story Aunt Esther tells. What do you mean? I asked. Isn't it true? Stories are never 'true', Mother said. But they may, almost by accident, contain 'truth'. Sometimes.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
It was a very American story, somehow. 'Lost.' Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
It was as if I'd been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.
~ Joyce Maynard
So you fell out of the sky, too? the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on.
~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez
The great essayist Montaigne understood that "in an essay, the track of a person's thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure." Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge.
~ Judith Barrington
The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs.
~ Judith Warner
That's right! And I'm going to tell him exactly how I got these stains on my
~ Judy Blume
Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.
~ Wallace Stegner
In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft.
~ Wallace Stegner
The doctrines of Christianity, or the many different theologies, are less true than the true myth because they are only attempts to translate the story, while God has expressed it all more adequately in the real incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
~ Walter Hooper