Selected Stories Quotes

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams ~ Dan Davin

I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference."
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, (from "Mates") ~ Edith Pearlman

The emptiness, the way his heels rang on the asphalt,was satisfying, emphasised his aloneness. A man alone, alone late at night with no one to say he should be home in bed. ~ Dan Davin

I think any good singer needs to be a good actor. You have to be able to tell the story. ~ Erica Schroeder

The sad ending is only because the author stops telling the story. But it still goes on. It's just untold. ~ Mark Polish

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice. ~ Vivian Gornick

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves. ~ Ira Glass

I've always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people's books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer's imagination. ~ Pat Conroy

The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders. ~ Paulo Freire

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script. ~ Clive Owen

I think we begin to lose the ability to read in the deepest, most interpretive ways because were not kind of calming our mind and just focusing on the argument or the story. ~ Nicholas G. Carr

I am truly amazed that after all this time, religious groups still need to attack entertainment and use these tragedies as a pitiful excuse for their own self-serving publicity. In response to their protests, I will provide a show where I balance my songs with a wholesome Bible reading. This way, fans will not only hear my so-called, violent point of view, but we can also examine the virtues of wonderful 'Christian' stories of disease, murder, adultery, suicide and child sacrifice. Now that seems like 'entertainment' to me. ~ Marilyn Manson

Oh, this absolute loneliness and the game - loving to play the game, loving to go and tell stories to men that certainly weren't true, just for the sport of it, just to see how they would react. ~ Jennifer Beals

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Some people call Police Story the greatest action film of all time, and while I have to be humble and say that I disagree, it's definitely the favorite action film I've ever made. ~ Jackie Chan

James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols. ~ Jon Landau

If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died. ~ Donald Miller

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."
"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."
"The storyteller should tell it. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Hermes has threatened me with slow mail. lousy Internet service and a horrible stock market if i publish this story. I hope he is just bluffing. ~ Rick Riordan

Sometimes I can still sleep it off, my fear. My dreams are gentle now even when they are about being mugged, robbed and knocked down, even when I am pressing my car key into a bit of yielding earth. But often in the afternoons I wake after a nap with an awful sense of its being over and that it never meant much; I never had a life. The valuable sweetness and the hard work are infected by the fact of death: they no longer seem to have been so wonderful, but they are all I had. And then I want to be comforted. I want my old, unthreatening forms of silence, and comedy-and-cowardice. I want breath and stories and the world. ~ Harold Brodkey

I like the idea all memory is fiction, that we have queued a couple of things in the back of our minds and when we call forth those memories, we are essentially filling in the blanks. We're basically telling ourselves a story, but that story changes based on how old we are, and what mood we're in, and if we've seen photographs recently. We trust other people to tell us the story of our lives before we can remember it, and usually that's our parents and usually it works, but obviously not always. And everybody's interpretation is going to be different. ~ Steven Tyler

Fresh content doesn't exist to game the SEO system. It's the words, images, and stories that truly engage us, make us want to share with others, and creates a bond between us and a brand. ~ Shawn Amos

Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true. ~ Susan J. Tweit

He was telling war stories. The funny, innocuous ones that made everyone forget that war could leave you without fingers, or legs, or a soul. ~ Sabrina Fedel

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that's just poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people. ~ James Lee Burke

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them. ~ Dan Chaon

I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl. ~ Richard Laymon

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas. ~ Steven Soderbergh

Gradually we learned each other's stories and secrets and we fell madly in love; the kind of love that some people probably find nauseating. ~ Ronan O'Brien

It's like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on forever. And I couldn't go back to sleep because of the dream of the whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner. I'd lie in the hot, rumpled bed, hot burning hot, trying to shut myself away and know that there were three eternities before the dawn. Everything was the night world, the other world where everything but good could happen, the world of ghosts and robbers and horrors, of things harmless in the daytime coming to life, the wardrobe, the picture in the book, the story, coffins, corpses, vampires, and always squeezing, tormenting darkness, smoke thick. And I'd think of anything because if I didn't go on thinking I'd remember whatever it was in the cellar down there, and my mind would go walking away from my body and go down three stories defenceless, down the dark stair past the tall, haunted clock, through the whining door, down the terrible steps to where the coffin ends were crushed in the walls of the cellar – and I'd be held helpless on the stone floor, trying to run back, run away, climb up---- ~ William Golding

There are multiple shows of record about a late-transitioning patriarch and how the kids are affected, and there are multiple narratives. That narrative on "Keeping up with the Kardashians," the answer is, they're pretty much fine. It's the same sort of story we were telling which is, you know what? Everybody's okay. ~ Jill Soloway

Women's stories have been neglected for so long - unless they were queens. Exploring the history of women is a way of redressing that imbalance. ~ Kate Williams

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. ~ Gilbert Ryle

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. ~ Hilary Mantel

I'd like to feel that an advertiser gets something extra when they advertise with us - a certain humanity that comes from upbeat and positive human interest letters and success stories. ~ Casey Kasem

Tower Bridge looked very grand in its new coat of blue, cream and gold paint. Gone was the dingy black and white of my youth. But otherwise it was just the same: gulls screaming overhead, and black water rushing past beneath. A magnificent view of the Tower from here. I took some pictures just for the record; then continued towards the East End which was only a short walk away. This would be the most painful part of my journey. ~ Bernie Morris

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair. ~ Anne Sexton

I found that men and women with high levels of shame resilience share these four elements: They understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them. They practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate. They reach out and share their stories with people they trust. They speak shame - they use the word shame, they talk about how they're feeling, and they ask for what they need. ~ Brene Brown

I'm always reading. And I keep a whole list of stories, often unusual stories. There are a hundred some-odd ideas on that list. ~ Joshuah Bearman

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places. ~ Louise Brown

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal. ~ A.A. Milne

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world. ~ C.K. Webb

By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading - and therefore writing - adventure stories. This was before I'd read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and T. Coraghessan Boyle, before I'd read something and really felt it, when writing was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering on sentience. I filled pages of white space with swashbuckling, rapier-wielding, sidekick-sacrificing, dragon-baiting romance.
(from 'High-School Confidential' in the The New Yorker.) ~ Tea Obreht

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities. ~ Ezra Klein

Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first! ~ Anne McCaffrey

London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sit-coms, soaps and squibs, walking round hand in hand. ~ Martin Amis

We age not by years, but by stories. ~ Maza-Dohta

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. ~ Haruki Murakami

[...] Like the God in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. There's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. Perversion always says otherwise. ~ David Dark