Quotes About Story

We all lie. We all guard secrets—sometimes terrible ones—a side to us so dark, so shameful, that we quickly avert our own eyes from the shadow we might glimpse in the mirror. Instead we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls. And on the surface of our lives, we work industriously to shape the public story of our selves . . .

Sure it was an odd coincidence for Gage Burton to be in possession of a fly she'd designed and given to her abductor, and for that fly to be tucked in between the pages of a news story that referenced Sebastian. But coincidences happened.

We're all tricksters. Each and every one of us. No one is a totally reliable narrator. Life is all Story. Every bit of it. We see things through the filter of our own unique worldviews, through our own longings and fears and loves, through our own traumas. Not one single person on this earth is able to

And an author can never claim his Story is complete until it has been read by a reader, and only then can the circle be closed. A Story can never remain static, either. For each new reader brings to the Story afresh his own unique set of past experiences, giving him a peculiar lens through which to conjure different emotions out of the very same words . . .

For ninety minutes now she had been listening to the Story of Kevin. Ninety minutes was the length of an entire film. She could have watched Anna Karenina and been less depressed.

I don't want to be alone in the end." Her soft, mesmerizing mix of vulnerability, pain, and stubbornness got him right in the heart. "So change the ending of your story." She looked at him like he was crazy, and hell, maybe he was. "You make it sound so easy," she said. This made him laugh roughly. "Nothing about love is easy.

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

Molly was arrested. Possession." I blinked at him. "She was possessed?

We're all the hero of our own story.

Chicago is an alien citadel, a source of power and terror. Mordor, basically. (One does not simply walk into Mordor - except that was exactly what everyone in the story did anyway.)

If I was writing during that window, then I imagine that the story was likely late as well and absolutely needed to be finished, so once again I met with inspiration at the corner of Late and Hurry up.

Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth.... That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Man's Search for Meaning

In every person there lies a book that can be enjoyed by others only by escaping through the lips or finger tips." - Jim Conover - 2000

Facts are fine, fer as they go, but they're like water bugs skittering atop the water. Legends, now - they go deep down and bring up the heart of a story.

The story about race that was embedded into America at the founding of our nation was a lie; it is time to change that story and discover a new one.

Reporting is all about legwork, getting out and finding the story. But all the stories are on the top floors, so you have to learn to climb stairs. That's what reporting is all about, climbing tenement stairs.

We were playing a story game Bucky had invented called the Last Supper. It consisted of allowing those evil, avenging creatures of God—horseflies—to light on the exposed skin of your arm or leg and take a bite. At that point, you make up an epitaph, which you deliver to the horsefly as he eats his last meal, and then you flatten the little bastard. The speeches are voted on by those in attendance, and the best speech wins a bottle of wine.

It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I" was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called "Victor." Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older;

This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes.

Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

the Blessed Damozel essence of every dream and fairy story and legend and fear ...

I am as free as the moonlight, and wild as the crashing of waves on the shore, and I am Queen of the blue salt road, and my story is only beginning.