Monsoon And Other Stories Quotes

It was June in Maharashtra, and the monsoon would not come. The whole district lay panting in the heat, the burning sky clapped tight overhead like the lid of a tandoor oven. Lean goats stumbled down the narrow alleyways, udders hanging slack and dry beneath them; beggars cried for water in every village. Dust-devils swept over baked clay and through the dry weeds, whistling and shrieking. Hot sand blew into the eyes of torpid bullocks as they leaned into the yoke, whips snapping over their bony backs. A single stream crept along the valley floor, shrunken and muddy, and women stood ankle deep in its shallows, beating their laundry against rocks that rippled and danced in the sun. ~ Arinn Dembo

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos ... but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven. ~ Susan Griffin

Mostly good is enough. Mostly good produces healthy kids who know they are valued and either forget the other parts or turn them into funny stories. ~ Jen Hatmaker

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind. ~ M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

'Monkeys' is made up of nine short stories that tell an overall story. 'Folly' is a series of vignettes all put together to tell a larger story. In 'Lust and Other Stories,' there are nine stories - three, three, three; the beginnings of love, the middles, and the afters. ~ Susan Minot

I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they'd say yes. ~ George R R Martin

They sat close to each other, and he told her a story about her eyes. They were beautiful dark lakes in which her thoughts swam about like mermaids. And her forehead was a snowy mountain, grand and shining. These were lovely stories. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

One of the things that did intrigue me about when I read the pilot - because I had not read the books before doing the show - was the mystery aspect of it. I didn't feel that it was just a crime-based story. It really does have that mystery element, and it felt like a throwback to other shows in the past that had a bit more of that. There was something iconic about it. The fact that it's set in Boston gave it a feeling that was different to me. So, I am definitely more of a fan of mysteries than I am of a circular crime-based genre. ~ Sasha Alexander

Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion, - these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash.
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.
At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette. ~ Victor Hugo

The commercial media … help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don't run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities – those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in "need creation", prompting consumers to want things they don't need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to "actualize" themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media. ~ Chris Hedges

My songs examine and explore little specific emotions or situations or stories ... They're kitchen table songs, like a conversation between me and one other person. It's almost like an alien has been sent to get emotional samples from human beings and put it all together on a record. ~ KT Tunstall

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn't quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you'll wake up and want something else, and you'll have to choose.
Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you're left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don't exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it's a risk you have to take. ~ Laurie Penny

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Why don't you just do it, then?" Racath hissed. "Just kill me. I dare you."

Now, I assume you know what this is. You've seen this before in other stories - the part where the disgruntled villain stands over the hero. He is triumphant, the hero now at his mercy. But when commanded to slay him, he hesitates. He lowers his sword. And he says: "I cannot."

If you are to take away but one thing from the words I have spoken, let it be this: there is a world of difference between "I Cannot" and "I will not".

"I cannot" is a surrender. It implies a lack of options. Someone who says such a thing does so only because they have no other choice. They do not WISH to relent - in fact, they usually want to obey their mandate and destroy the hero at their feet. But they cannot, because the guilt is too unbearable. But that does not make him a better man; all that a man who says "I cannot" has done, is given in to the compulsion to repent.

Allow me to make myself perfectly clear - I HAD other options. Easy options. Simple options. I could have killed Racath Thanjel that day. I could have killed him and all the others, too. I could have left them dead and bloody on that grassy hill, and gone trotting back to the Imperator's lap. I could have shrugged off the attrition that had dogged my every step, thought better of my disenssion, given up on all hope of absolution and accepted my damnation. And I could have spent the rest of eternity destroying God' ~ S.G. Night

Look," said Lamia, "what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct? ~ Dan Simmons

Children don't read 'genres'; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don't distinguish between 'true' and 'not true,' because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn't possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn't talk, or that sentient beings shouldn't live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren't read as 'science fiction'; they're read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it's no use pretending otherwise. ~ Margaret Atwood

What if a family isn't a tree at all? What if it's more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought... what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they're invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else. ~ Michael Christie

I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms ... then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works ... while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet. ~ Brian Froud

The beauty of Milicent's life and work was, like that of many other women, purposefully hidden to rob her of her power and her influence. Milicent Patrick is the lady from the black lagoon and she's not alone. She's raised out of it now, but there are so many women – in every industry, living and dead – who are still in there. So many other stories are sunken in the depths of history and so many women are still shouldering the burden of harassment and abuse while trying to create. Thanks to technology and the bravery of countless women, the tides are finally changing. ~ Mallory O'Meara

I saw everyone, a shifting sea of discomfort and sadness, each person carrying his own pain, each telling her own stories, no story more or less tragic or triumphant than any other. ~ Jennifer Brown

The quintessential emblem of religion - and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core - is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.
Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son. ~ Stephen Greenblatt

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is. ~ Ang Lee

But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary's clerk in Marommes." And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I was out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles." This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant. "it was night, the street was deserted." The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves be caught and we put it aside: this a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently appreciate. And we feel t ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time. ~ Charles Soule

Here's the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes - especially the most verboten and destructive ones - the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it's simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality - metaphor, irony - and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.
Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it's what you can't say that makes it lasting? ~ Laura Kipnis

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did. ~ Ray Bradbury

They heard Hugo ask if the plan for the hors d'oeuvres was still in operation, and they heard Colette ask about plucking the feathers off crows, and they heard Kevin complain that he didn't know whether to hold the birdpaper in his right hand or his left hand, and they heard Mr. Lesko insult Mrs. Morrow, and the bearded man sing a song to the woman with the crow-shaped hat, and they heard a man call for Bruce and a woman call for her mother and dozens of people whisper to and shout at, argue with and agree upon, angrily accuse and meekly defend, furiously compliment and kindly insult dozens of other people, both inside and outside the Hotel Denouement, whose names the Baudelaires recognized, forgot, and had never heard before. Each story had its story, and each story's story was unfathomable in the Baudelaire orphans' short journey, and many of the stories' stories are unfathomable to me, even after all these lonely years and all this lonely research. Perhaps some of these stories are clearer to you, because you have spied upon the people involved. Perhaps Mrs. Bass has changed her name and lives near you, or perhaps Mr. Remora's name is the same, and he lives far away. Perhaps Nero now works as a grocery store clerk, or Geraldine Julienne now teaches arts and crafts. Perhaps Charles and Sir are no longer partners, and you have had the occasion to study one of them as he sat across from you on a bus, or perhaps Hugo, Colette, and Kevin are still comrades, and you have followe ~ Lemony Snicket

There were many stories of girls - brave girls, foolish girls, reckless girls, pretty girls - who went into the woods searching for fortune or adventure, only to encounter a monster. Whether man or beast, the monster served as an allegory for all the things that could befall a girl who strayed from the path. If she were valorous and her heart was pure, the stories said, she could rise above being brought low by hubris.

But the stories never talked about the other girls - the ones who never came out of the woods and found themselves an unwilling bride to the venal darkness within those trees. The girls whose virtue was not quite enough to resist the seasoned allure of the wicked villain and who, as a result, found that men, like beasts, could devour the unwary, and that it could feel so good to be consumed. ~ Nenia Campbell

One of the remarkable qualities of the story is that it creates space. We can dwell in a story, walk around, find our own place. The story confronts but does not oppress; the story inspires but does not manipulate. The story invites us to an encounter, a dialogue, a mutual sharing. As long as we have stories to tell to each other there is hope. As long as we can remind each other of the lives of men and women in whom the love of God becomes manifest, there is reason to move forward to new land in which new stories are hidden. ~ Henri Nouwen

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet. ~ Lee Gutkind

I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. ~ Jojo Moyes

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged. ~ Dina Nayeri

Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story. ~ John Truby

There wouldn't be so many stories about vampires and zombies and other weird creatures if they didn't really exist. ~ R.L. Stine

Once I'd worked out that I couldn't possibly expect people to enjoy a monstrous, 3000-page book, I realised I could in fact create a labyrinth of a story with four different points of entry. But what interested me was creating something that would rearrange itself every time you read one of the other books. So depending on which order you read them, the implications and angles would change. To get that right, each one of the books had to have its own personality and texture
even though they are connected, they are very different creatures. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak. ~ Sarah Jio

It was not the fault of Christian censors or a theological thought-police that the "other" Gospels were criticized and rejected. The "other" Gospels were not recognizable as "gospel," and they failed to capture the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Christians in the worldwide church. The proof of this is the limited number of extant manuscripts for many of these "other" Gospels and the fact that many Jesus books were not known beyond their own immediate circles. The exclusion of other Gospels was not the result of the victory of the orthodox. It was rather based on an objective claim as to who more properly transmitted the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. In the end, the reason the "other" Gospels lost out is that they simply failed to convince the majority of their antiquity and authenticity as stories of Jesus. ~ Michael F. Bird

In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns
Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila. ~ John Grisham

You must liberate your mind of such dogmatic ideals, rid yourself of this unending illusion that stories have clear beginnings and endings. Stories never begin, nor do they end. They are comprised of people living an endless cycle of interacting, influencing each other, and parting ways. As long as stories are told they should not have clear endings. ~ Ryohgo Narita

Some stories don't get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn
one could carry the world that way.
They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day. ~ Sarah Blake

I mean, we have to read books or we'll make mistakes. If we read stories of how other people lived, we can figure out better ways to live. I mean we can look at other people's lives and not make the same mistakes they made. Or we can, like, use their examples as models for ourselves. ~ Rachel DeWoskin

A THOUSAND WORDS

My stepfather Ralph Newman was a merry and remarkable man, a former minor league second baseman who broke his nose on a double play ball and wound up opening the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago. He was also president of the Chicago Public Library.

Ralph used to huff about that phrase, A picture is worth a thousand words and ask, "Does anyone really stop to figure out what you could do with a thousand words?"

And, rather in the way that my daughters and I trade, try out, and create stories with each other, my stepfather and I spread out a napkin and came up with this:

One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you:
the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm,
the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary.

You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth. ~ Scott Simon

Some find it hard to write emotively. I've had some people say to me that they simply cannot. There are two ways to try and achieve it, to either draw upon your own lives experiences or pushing your imagination into those circumstances and feeling how your heart reacts.
When I write emotively much of it comes from my own experiences and thoughts. But for some things it is not because I have experienced every emotion in my short life time already. It means I am able to imagine in my mind a given situation and feel how my heart reacts to those thoughts. Forcing myself deep into the moment of fantasy and not fearing how I feel. Some writers rely on this skill, not picturing it in their mind they are feeling it as though with their own heart even though the situation is not one they have found themselves to have been in. I believe I struggle with this, I challenge myself in some of my stories and writing that I do but I find myself favouring writing about what I know, what I have felt in my own life, love being most favoured but also excitement, worry, fear and of course sorrow. Many people will be happy to write about joy and happiness but would never write of their fears and weaknesses, feeling that for others to see you so exposed in a raw state of emotion adds to the agony of the original event you are writing about. Especially those who want to be seen as strong all the time, they worry that so show any emotion other than strength of positivity is weakness. This façade ~ Raven Lockwood

Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women's circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible. ~ Isabel Allende