Story Urge Quotes

When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off. ~ Paul Russell

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'. ~ William Golding

1 Pardon this highly unusual footnote, but I must break the Narrator's "fourth wall" to explain that this story will be "tricksy" in more than one way. Kitty Cheshire does not like being narrated. She seems to be aware of my watching her, and she resists. At times her thoughts and feelings squirm away from my inspection. I shall do my best, however, to narrate a completely true story about Ever After's most elusive character. ~ Shannon Hale

Want to hear a sad story about the Dukakis campaign? The governor of Massachusetts, he lost his top naval advisor last week. His rubber ducky drowned in the bathtub. ~ Dan Quayle

And when my time is up, have I done enough? Will they tell my story? ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves. ~ Fede Alvarez

How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story? ~ Martha Rosler

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story. ~ Jim Lehrer

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker. ~ Steven Spielberg

Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long. ~ Brit Marling

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are. ~ Justin Vernon

Moved through the days in peace and wonder, for his whole story had been told for the first time, and he found that he was still loved. ~ Andrew Peterson

Every heart has a story to tell. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of it's very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can't-I don't have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened.
She says, "Yes, there are lives sadder than the saddest of books." I say, "Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life. ~ Agota Kristf

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There's no natural light in this pub, so it's dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They're so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I've turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don't make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can't afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound. ~ Craig Stone

I just wanted to tell the story of a bunch of musicians who had never had their story told before. There's no preaching or theorizing. ~ Michael Azerrad

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words. ~ Elmore Leonard

Fuck Kerouac; he would write his own story. ~ Linda Collison

Twenty minutes later, a new message came in, this one from Sydney herself: Back in human form. Everything seems to be normal. Everything? I questioned. Well, aside from a weird urge to chase laser pointers, she responded. If that's the worst effect, I'll take it. Keep me posted. I love you. ~ Richelle Mead

Marriage is treated by all civilized societies as a peculiar and favored contract. It is in its origin a contract of natural law ... It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic. ~ Joseph Story

In some ways, Mary thought, Irma lived her whole life anxious to get things over with, as if she knew the end of her story all along, and didn't feel the middle pages worth the effort of a read. ~ Lori Lansens

If it's me who loves you, you'll know, as I will tell it you in my own words. ~ Auliq Ice

We may say that the characters in fairytales are 'good to think with'…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer. ~ Brian Wicker

I left him with only that--the simple story that he had been with his mother this entire time, that he had helped her all of these years, that the love he still felt for her was a good, pure thing to hold on to.
And when I turned to go, releasing his mind for the last time, he looked out the window again at the blackbirds diving and rolling around each other, fluttering across the blue sky, and he smiled. ~ Alexandra Bracken

A moment of reserve. "That was it? The whole story?"
"Yes. God, you're right. That was pants."
I sidestep another aggressive couscous vendor. "Pants?"
"Rubbish. Crap. Shite."
Pants. Oh heavens, that's cute. ~ Stephanie Perkins

When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose. ~ Samuel Colbran

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another.
Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with?
And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims. ~ Isaac Asimov

I… that took a lot of guts, what you did today."
"Can't really pretend it didn't happen anymore, right?" And being a better person doesn't mean hiding from or lying about who I used to be.
"So much of what you talked about is shit that happens in school very day, Aria. The gossip, the text messages, the comments. People do it all the time. Everyone does it. I've done it. Doesn't make it okay but… I can see how it spiralled out of control like that."
I shrug. "I figured, if my story makes people stop and think about what their words could do to a person, then I should tell it right?"
"Right." He nods slowly, his eyes roaming my face.
"I miss you," I don't mean to say it aloud, but it slips out anyway.
He offers me a sad smile. "I miss you, too, AJ. ~ K.A. Tucker

I think, though, that people will read into a reporter's story a bias that they want to see in a reporter. ~ Garrett Graff

Never again will a single story be told as though its the only one. ~ John Berger

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going - people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward. After ~ Haruki Murakami

My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else. ~ Kate Atkinson

This is one of my favorite books Lisa has ever written. You couldn't ask for a better story. ~ Lisa Renee Jones

My husband jokes that I'll invite people over for dinner and he won't know who they are or where I met them. But in my work world, I've never really been tempted to tell too much of my story. ~ Carrie-Anne Moss

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it? ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Art
make me eternal, give such body to my undying soul. ask the art, art can do it...
...art can give you the age you want, the life span you want...art can give an ever lasting face to your love and joys; art can give an unending life to your acts, and an novel agelessness to your intercourse with this life that you love and we love...we all. Love, that too is Art and fill your memory yard with its art exhibitions.... ~ Jamaluddin Jamali

My father once told me that a happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. So this is where I choose to stop. More things are still going to happen, of course, some good, some bad. Some things never get any better. When people die they stay dead. None of us knows why we love, or why we stop loving, or why everyone we love we lose. ~ Leah Stewart

There is a holy story that tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy's field one night. Bjartur's story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy's field all his life, day and night. Such is the story of the most independent man in the country. Moors; more moors. From the ravine there came an eerie echoing rumble as the headstone crashed its way down, and the bitch sprang to the brink, barking wildly. ~ Halldor Laxness

In fact, after a while it was the machines I was looking at, not my father at all. They had become him. They were telling me his story. Which ~ Daniel Wallace

My favorite movies are love stories. ~ Tom Savini

We take those things we need
from the Confederates' abandoned homes:
salt, sugar, even this journal, near full
with someone else's words, overlapped now,
crosshatched beneath mine. On every page,
his story intersecting with my own. ~ Natasha Trethewey

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this. ~ Neil Gaiman

i met you and I knew,
I was seeking you &
you were seeking me to. ~ Nikki Rowe

It portrayed motherhood as the highest position that a woman could achieve. For God had made Mary neither a prophet nor the messiah nor the daughter of God. Nor did God take the form of a woman. She was only the womb. She was a perpetual virgin too, and she endured the vilest harassment because of it, or so the story went. Rebecca couldn't relate to the Virgin Mary at all. ~ Jeffry R. Halverson

Any work of art must first of all tell a story. ~ Robert Frost

Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes. ~ Chinua Achebe

All of life is a story ~ Madeleine L'Engle

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. ~ Ron Carlson