Small Stories Quotes

I like small, domestic stories. ~ Kevin Henkes

I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo. ~ Rachel Sklar

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories. ~ Virginia Henley

He loved her in a subtle kind of way. It wasn't the kind of love you see in movies, with swelling music and giant gestures and running through the streets to catch a departing train. It wasn't the kind of love that Byron or Shakespeare wrote about, with flowery language and hyperbole and iambic pentameter. It was still and deep, like water that you might mistake for shallow if you just watched the surface. It was entirely his, not dependent on her own feelings for him, and it would still be there whether she, or him, or everyone else on the world disappeared. It was a subtle kind of love, but it was true. ~ Jake Christie

I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories. ~ Sigourney Weaver

It's nice if you're making a regular pop or rock album and you get ten little songs. But I really try to make the album with one big story instead of ten small stories. ~ Hans-Peter Lindstrom

'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. ~ Seth Shostak

Abandoning the tiny story of me and embracing the forever Story of Jesus will allow our little lives to be filled with the wonder of God as we live for the unending applause of His name. And joining our small stories to His will give us what we all want most in life, anyway: the assurance that our brief moments on earth will count for something in a Story that never ends. ~ Louie Giglio

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long. ~ Alice Lowe

I like small stories. ~ Paz Vega

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations. ~ Christine Kenneally

In a weird way, 'Veronica Mars' was my reaction to 'Freaks and Geeks' because 'Freaks and Geeks' was the show I wanted to write, the one I wanted to create, where there was no gimmick; you didn't have to have a teenage private eye. It was just these beautiful small stories about real kids. ~ Rob Thomas

There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. 'I would like to look at you' seems like such an awkward request. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories. ~ Cullen Bunn

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up. ~ Stephen King

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place. ~ Howard Zinn

Toward an Organic Philosophy

SPRING, COAST RANGE
The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless,
The circle of white ash widens around it.
I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time
I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller.
Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw;
The moon has come before them, the light
Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees.
It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish,
Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons;
The foetid adder's tongue lolls by the waterfall.
There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now.
There were sheep here after the farm, and fire
Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch,
The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil
Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat
And plate the surface like scales.
Twenty years ago the spreading gully
Toppled the big oak over onto the house.
Now there is nothing left but the foundations
Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge,
Six lonely, ominous fenceposts;
The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge
Over the deep waterless creek bed;
The hills are covered with wild oats
Dry and white by midsummer.
I walk in the random survivals of the orchard.
In a patch of moonlight a mole
Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein;
Orion walks waist deep in the ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Evil is not one large entity, but a collection of countless, small depravities brought up from the muck by petty men. Many have traded the enrichment of vision for a gray fog of mediocrity--the fertile inspiration of striving and growth, for mindless stagnation and slow decay--the brave new ground of the attempt, for the timid quagmire of apathy. Many of you have traded freedom not even for a bowl of soup, but worse, for the spoken empty feelings of others who say that you deserve to have a full bowl of soup provided by someone else. Happiness, joy, accomplishment, achievement . . . are not finite commodities, to be divided up. Is a child's laughter to be divided and allotted? No! Simply make more laughter! Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing their means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man's throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals who compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of the society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters. Surrendering reason to fa ~ Terry Goodkind

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence. ~ Peter Gay

Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes a' la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world. In the theory of literature, "projection" (of the reader into the character) no longer has any currency: yet it is the appropriate tonality of imaginative readings: reading a love story, it is scarcely adequate to say I project myself; I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with his image in the very enclosure of the book (everyone knows that such stories are read in a state of secession, of retirement, of voluptuous absence: in the toilet). ~ Roland Barthes

This, O my Best Beloved is a story – a new and wonderful story – a story quite different from the other stories ~ Rudyard Kipling

related type of argument is that we ought - rather callously - to welcome small and medium-scale catastrophes on grounds that they make us aware of our vulnerabilities and spur us into taking precautions that reduce the probability of an existential catastrophe. The idea is that a small or medium-scale catastrophe acts like an inoculation, challenging civilization with a relatively survivable form of a threat and stimulating an immune response that readies the world to deal with the existential variety of the threat.15 ~ Nick Bostrom

Pram wasn't told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time. ~ Lauren DeStefano

Our civilization overflows with charity - which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help - just wages for honest labor - there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She ~ David Graham Phillips

There's small Revenge in Words, but Words may be greatly revenged ~ Benjamin Franklin

The startup's goal is to find a profitable customer acquisition strategy by spending small amounts of money in a lot of them, measuring results, and then narrowing down the best channels, while performing PDCA for continuous improvement. ~ Francisco S. Homem De Mello

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people. ~ Claire Tomalin

Calculus works by making visible the infinitesimally small. ~ Keith Devlin

all this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but they're wrong. The world's economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
There's a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner.
Everyone else ignores them. ~ Cory Doctorow

The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow. ~ Ananda Braxton-Smith

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition. ~ Ethan Canin

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women. ~ Edna O'Brien

Whatever you do, do with deep alertness, then even small things become sacred. ~ Rajneesh

I just try to keep it fresh. I try to keep it interesting. The truth is my roots are independently spirited dramas that are small, and I will always go back to that well, because that's where I broke out of. But I'm going to keep doing as many different movies as I possibly can. ~ Nicolas Cage

The unknown is the most frightening and mysterious thing, especially in the modern world where we can practically Google anything and find out the back story. I think to have that element of mystery [in your movie], it almost creates a frustration that is closer to real life. ~ Larry Fessenden

I'm fighting for small businesses. I'm not fighting for big oil. Don't be confused. And there are thousands of businesses in this state that are at great risk. Meanwhile, the country keeps guzzling the oil, but we're out of work down here. We need to get back to work to build this region, and we intend to do so. ~ Mary Landrieu

That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain. ~ Susanna Kaysen

If there's one thing these stories prove, it's that heroism comes in all shapes, sizes and varieties – whether it's Remus Lupin giving his life to save the wizarding world or Silvanus Kettleburn hurling Flobberworms at Death Eaters from his attic. After all, you don't have to be a sword-wielding Gryffindor to be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place. ~ J.K. Rowling

Jellicle Cats are black and white
Jellicle Cats are rather small
Jellicle Cats are merry and bright
And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul.
Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces,
Jellicle Cats have bright black eyes;
They like to practise their airs and graces
And wait for the Jellicle Moon to rise. ~ T. S. Eliot

What kind of hellish punishment does Lev have planned if he needs the females' crazy magic moon water? Nothing Talon has ever heard of but the gryphon is a recluse and stories about him keep children from sneaking out alone; a terribly convoluted mixture of the rogue army attack on his eyrie, death, and the name Lev, one of the few survivors mean enough to live through it. ~ Elizabeth Munro

Small talk was an art form, one of those things that made people's eyes gloss over. Go silent, and they might start wondering why. But keep them talking about nothing at all, and they wouldn't even blink. ~ V.E. Schwab

New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect. ~ Patrice Pavis

The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one's head. ~ Pat R

If you are far away from your lover and family, if you have lost someone, if you feel a bit displaced in your own life: these stories are for you. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what - Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen. "A rust bomb," he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before. Karl ~ Gregory Benford

Can I ask why you're throwing knives at cheese?'
'Caleb came by to discuss something,' Tobias says, leaning his head against the wall as he looks at me. 'And knife-throwing just came up somehow.'
'As it so often does,' I say, a small smile inching across my face. ~ Veronica Roth

The incompetent always present thmeselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and teh feeble-minded as intellectual. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I want a sword to slit her end to end and then, with one hundred more cuts, dice her body into small pieces and leave the bloodied,quivering remains of skin, muscle, and soulless guts on her front lawn, arranged in a gruesome scarlet letter. ~ Julie Metz

I never would rule out a great character or a great story. I don't care what the forum is. If I get to tell a story that I'm excited about, I'm in. ~ Katherine Heigl

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God

Ninety percent of what's wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don't look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich. ~ Mary Karr

I am told that in the heart of a vast, bowl-shaped valley deep inside the High Pamir where the sheep and the goats spend their summers grazing by the hundreds as far as the eye can see, there is a cold blue stream that meanders through emerald meadows until it spills into a small lake that carries the color of the sky and that the surface of this lake and the surrounding grasslands shiver in unison beneath the movement of a wind that never stops blowing. ~ Greg Mortenson

The ease with which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before. All of our small anxieties and trivial preoccupations evaporate with the sudden recognition of what really matters. We are reminded of the impermanence of much that we assume is forever and the value of so much we take for granted. ~ Arianna Huffington

And Israel, being a tiny, small country, of course has interest to strengthen - we have interest to strengthen our relations with other countries, mostly countries that were hostile for many, many years. ~ Ariel Sharon