Story Finish Quotes

Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important.
It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons.
Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it. ~ Tad Williams

I am off to the pages racing my way through to the story's finish line - the end. ~ Jazz Feylynn

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before. ~ Quentin Tarantino

I love you. I don't need you to love me back. I don't need to be with you. I don't need to sleep with you. I don't need you to tell me how beautiful I am everyday. I don't need a fairytale love story. I don't need a happily ever after. I don't need you to take care of me when I am feeling sick, or depressed or ask me if I'm okay, even though you know I'm not. I don't need you to hold my hand or give me your coat when its cold. All I want is to be looked at like I'm actually a human. Not like I'm a contagious freak. All I want is to be something to you, even if its not special. Just. Something. ~ Youknownotmyname

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul. ~ Jane Yolen

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that. ~ Bill Keller

I'm a story teller. I really know how to tell stories of Africa. ~ Angelique Kidjo

Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. ~ Paul Doiron

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ~ W. H. Auden

The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph - "I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence" - applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette's stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, "I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped. ~ Sarah Vowell

A deadline is a finish line. Don't stop 'til the door shuts in your face! ~ Raven Moore

Ah, now,' the count said casually, 'you must do as you wish, Viscount, because this is your business and you are in charge; but I must say that in your place I should say nothing of all these adventures. Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels bound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum, even when they are as gilded as you are capable of being. Allow me to point out this difficulty to you, Monsieur le Vicomte, which is that no sooner will you have told your touching story to someone, that it will travel all round society, completely distorted. You will have to play the part of Antony, and Antony's day has passed somewhat. You might perhaps enjoy the reputation of a curiosity, but not everyone likes to be the centre of attention and the butt of comment. It might possibly fatigue you. ~ Alexandre Dumas

When the reader has stopped to wonder at your delamificatious vocabulary, or, worse, when the reader has stopped because the word you've used has no more meaning to him than a random ptliijnbvc of letters, the reader is not involved in your story ... Generally, saying 'edifice' instead of 'building' doesn't tell your reader anything about the building; it tells the reader that you know that word edifice. ~ Howard Mittelmark

I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply. ~ Ingrid Bergman

An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God, 'O, Allah,' Rabia prayed, 'if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.'

In Christian tradition this comes under the heading of unconditional love, though it is usually understood as the kind of love God exercises toward humans instead of the other way around. Now, thanks to a Muslim mystic from Iraq, I have a new way of understanding what it means to love God unconditionally. Whenever I am tempted to act from fear of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, Rabia leans over from here religion into mine and empties a bucket of water on my head. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

I sit by his bed and pull the covers over him. In doing so, I accidently brush against his thigh.
And that's when I feel it.
That same electrical sensation I got the first time I touched the spot - in my room, when I begged him to stay the night. The feeling radiates up my spine and gnaws at my nerves. It's like something's there, marked on his leg.
I run my fingers over the spot - through the blanket - almost tempted to have a look. I close my eyes, trying to sense things the way he does - to get a mental picture from merely touching the area. But I can't. And I don't.
Still, I have to know if I'm right.
I peer over my shoulder toward the door, checking to see that no one's looking in. And then I roll the covers down.
Ben's wearing a hospital gown. With trembling fingers, I pull the hem and see it right away: the image of a chameleon, tattooed on his upper thigh. It's about four inches long, with green and yellow stripes.
And its tail curls into the letter C.
I feel my face furrow, wondering when he got the tattoo, and why he never told me. It wasn't so long ago that I told him the story of my name - how my mother named me after a chameleon, because chameleons have keen survival instincts. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

The old story is a story of measurement. And the New Story is to bring measurement and meaning together. You cannot measure meaning. ~ Satish Kumar

Be careful, you'll ruin your dinner," I said. "I'm a fucking adult. Ruining my dinner is one of the few pleasures in life," she said as she stuffed the cookies in her mouth. "True story. Give me some of those. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

A fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. "Second stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story. ~ Janet Malcolm

Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes. ~ Andrew Neel

Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it. ~ Patrick Ness

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. ~ C.S. Lewis

Heat stirred in Cassius's gut. His pulse beat hard and heavy like a fist punching against his skin. He knew he should look away but could not. He struggled to make sense of this moment, each moment from the very first when the prince asked Cas to meet him. It was as if he'd stepped inside a fairy tale, a story he would make up for Emily and Elizabeth, a make-believe land where he would have something in common with someone like Prince Merrick. Where someone like the prince would look upon him as an equal. That's what this was, he realized. In this piece of time, they were not prince and servant. They were two men who felt tied to their lives. At any moment, he expected to be roused by Valor and for all this to have been a dream, but Valor did not come, and Cassius didn't awaken ~ Riley Hart

Since I'm a story-oriented critic, sometimes it's difficult to discuss issues without defining them. At the same time, I try not to give away anything that hasn't been given away in first half, in TV commercials, or that isn't obvious from the set-up of the movie. My editors are aware of this tendency of mine and read carefully for spoilers. ~ Stephen Hunter

The first thing I do is lay out that melody and figure out how it has to hold here and then finish to land here, because you know in advance you're going to want the melody to catch four things in the action. ~ Danny Elfman

Most of the girls I've met since moving here have failed to ignite any modicum of enduring interest. Of course, I've dated; I'm seventeen years old and as horny as the next guy. ~ Siobhan Davis

- the only difference between a happy ending and a sad ending is where you decide the story ends. ~ Andrew Kaufman

What I wasn't expecting was a ghost.
The ghost of Elodie Parris, to be exact, standing at my feet, glaring down at me, arms crossed. She was glowing so brightly that I squinted as I sat up. Elodie had been murdered by my great-grandmother nearly a year ago (long story), and thanks to a little shared magic between us before she died, her ghost was now tied to me.
"Oh, wow," I croaked. "I was just lying here thinking this night could not get any worse, and then it totally did. Huh. ~ Rachel Hawkins

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out. ~ Dave Eggers

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it. ~ Alberto Giacometti

And I'm not fighting. My plan is to enjoy the food until you kick me out. ~ Kiera Cass

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. ~ Haruki Murakami

As you face the truth, it becomes a sophisticated story of pain, loss and life., a story that you can honor, as it challenges you to rise above your fears.
To deny one's own pain and loss is to put a lie on the lips of your own soul. But with the non-denial comes the bliss falling on your life.....


….Jayita Bhattacharjee ~ Jayita Bhattacharjee

If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave-What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to hear the story. ~ Italo Calvino

After all, it wouldn't be the first time that I'd let a beautiful woman rip the molecules of my body apart, shoot them through a light beam, and throw them back together somewhere else for credits. But that's another story... ~ John Zakour

You had a huge impact on Ethan. No doubt, in the story of his life, you've left your mark everywhere. ~ Leisa Rayven

I don't want to put 12 singles on an album. I want to make a story, a little movie. ~ Zedd

Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. ~ Henry Miller

Never stray from your own kind, Jessen," my mother would say, "or you could end up like Princess Morga, a slave and outcast to be abhorred."

The problem was, I'd never been a very obedient daughter. Never the one to do exactly as I was told. And fairy tales have no meaning when the stars align and Fortune spins her wheel, weaving her own story for your heart. ~ Juliette Cross

When you're a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I'll do, and especially when I'm in New York, I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite. ~ Gordon Ramsay

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don't really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don't care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.
Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that 'something bigger'. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied "that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: 'Don't bother about it. From there onwards it's turtles all the way down. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth; that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again. ~ Steve Maraboli

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes. ~ Michael Connelly

I gave up practically the whole world for you," I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. "The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you. ~ Jandy Nelson

That is the real story of my lift, and that is why I wrote this book. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us. ~ J.D. Vance