Quotes About Story

Ellingham was in the mountains of Vermont. Its story was the stuff of legend, its reputation gold-plated, its illustrious graduates legion. Its story was long but can best be summarized thusly:

The story is the story of Howard Roark's triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man's spirit, a hymn glorifying a man's "I." It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way—and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph.

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.

We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Then, during the course of our conversation, he repeated the same story that my grandfather had told, about the white man who had tried to purchase my father's forgiveness

Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party.

For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Finally, I set some reassuring limits to whatever tribulations I might have to endure. First, I would always have a car. In Key West I drove my own; in other cities I used Rent-A-Wrecks, which I paid for with a credit card rather than my earnings. Yes, I could have walked more or limited myself to jobs accessible by public transportation. I just figured that a story about waiting for buses would not be very interesting to read. Second

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.

The Pueblo story is that everyone started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under. […] 'I always try to think of it that way,' he said, after a minute. "He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them.

We've got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.