Quotes About Story

The great spy novelist John Le Carré suggested this axiom: The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story. The cat sat on the dog's mat, is.

In other words, the animals are not similar to the man — in the way that the woman will be. The animals are certainly different from the man, but that is not what the story is interested in. It is pursuing not differences but someone similar to the man, someone similar enough to be "his partner" (in contrast to the animals, who are not sufficiently similar), and someone strong enough to be his "helper.

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that "he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.

When the story of the war comes to be written," Harold Ickes testified at the hearings, "if it has to be written that it was lost, it may be because of the recalcitrance of ALCOA.

Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know.

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

Deux ou trois choses dont je suis sûre, et l'une d'entre elles est que raconter l'histoire jusqu'au bout est un acte d'amour

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

By the time that poem became the story "River of Names,"* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie.

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don't know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.

I say--I've thought of a good plot for a detective story. Really? Top--hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces.

After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever. This is not her story.

You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists

Esta no es la historia de la muchacha. Sino la de aquella catástrofe terrible y estúpida, y la de algunas de sus consecuencias. También es la historia de un libro, titulado Guía del autoestopista galáctico; no se trata de un libro terrestre, pues nunca se publicó en la Tierra y, hasta que ocurrió la terrible catástrofe, ningún terrícola lo vio ni oyó hablar de él.

the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

Možda je molitva zapravo želja da ulan?aš doga?aje u svom životu tako da sa?ine pri?u- nešto što pokazuje smisao doga?aja za koje znaš da imaju zna?enje. Bar se zato ja molim Harj