This Is The Story Of How I Died Quotes

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: 'Don't believe her.'

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark. ~ Lauren Oliver

The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is 'a story' that man started society because he was 'cast out of a garden because of a sin.' He doesn't attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not know. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous. ~ David Rakoff

There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?" - meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you! ~ Alan W. Watts

And then came Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, a new book by conservative author Peter Schweizer, which documents a long series of large financial transactions conducted between the Clinton Foundation and supplicants seeking favors from the State Department while she was Secretary of State from 2009-2012. The book, whose author is currently being pilloried as a partisan hack by the usual parade of Clinton's minions but the allegations in which are largely untouched as to their substance and veracity, more or less establishes a pattern of bribe-taking by the Clintons from foreign governments and connected players and marks her as perhaps the most personally corrupt plutocrat ever to seek the office of the presidency. ~ Anonymous

It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do, and the holiday season - like all the other seasons - is a good time not only to tell stories of miracles, but to think about the miracles in your own life, and to be grateful for them, and that's the end of this particular story. ~ Lemony Snicket

Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person's story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional - to inhabit another person's view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it's okay if I don't feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, 'One trains one's imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this? ~ Valarie Kaur

No, the point of this story is that there are only a select few friends, past or present, that I would go to such lengths to stand by. That's what school really taught me: the enduring nature of friendship. How special it is to grow up and share a history with someone. As I've gotten older, friendships rooted in childhood feel even richer and more irreplaceable. ~ Connor Franta

Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times - something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahotomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. ~ Matthew Walker

I think," she said, "I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love." . . .

"What do you think the story is about now?" . . .

"Sometimes I think it's a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn't accidental, him confiding in me, just then." Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it's I want you to think that I trust you with this. ~ Miranda Popkey

As we leave our youth, there's a pull toward complacency. We can start to coast, settle for what's familiar and lose the juicy desire to expand our frontiers. We adopt the paradigm of a victim. We make excuses and then recite them so many times we train our subconscious mind to think they are true. We blame other people and outer conditions for our struggles, and we condemn past events for our private wars. We grow cynical and lose the curiosity, wonder, compassion and innocence we knew as kids. We become apathetic. Critical. Hardened. Within this personal ecosystem the majority of us create for ourselves, mediocrity then becomes acceptable. And because this mindset is running within us each day, the viewpoint seems so very real to us. We truly believe that the story we are running reveals the truth - because we're so close to it. So, rather than showing leadership in our fields, owning our crafts by producing dazzling work and handcrafting delicious lives, we resign ourselves to average. ~ Robin S. Sharma

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world - God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator. ~ Fulton Oursler

This is all based on a true story, gentlemen. Hollywood big shots lined up all the way to the Hills to have a diet soda with me, but I wasn't gonna let them fuck me! No, sir!" Graham flashed his middle finger to the erstwhile line of big shots. "Feel free to fuck yourselves, you bunch of Weinsteins! ~ Aleksandar Hemon

The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage. ~ Marcus Du Sautoy

We understand today that the physical universe is bigger and older and operates very differently than how the biblical writers, and all other ancient people, thought. Many Christians stumble over this, thinking they are showing respect for the Bible and obeying God by making the biblical story mesh with modern science, or rejecting modern science entirely in favor of God's Word. But there is no need to feel embarrassed or unfaithful by acknowledging that ancient writers wrote from an ancient mind-set. When ancient Israelites wrote as they did about the physical world, they were expressing their faith in God in ways that fit their understanding. It shouldn't get our knickers in a twist to admit that, from a scientific point of view, they were wrong. That doesn't make their faith or the God behind it all any less genuine. ~ Peter Enns

Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be. ~ Helen Macdonald

Imagination is the ability to produce new ideas without the need of time to stop and actually think about it. I'll produce elevator buttons - I bought that business from Jarod Kintz, who was only selling it, because he found a new, more profitable job – male prostitution (he's selling his grandpa's services, not his own, because his own are virtually non-existent – he's a monk now, and monks are sworn to celibacy, you know, or should, by now). Buy now - grieve later. Two 5th floor buttons for your floorless cardboard-built tree house, for the price of one, 7-story tall tree, which, for the purpose of this story we'll call Nathan. Nathan sends you its best regards and wishes you a happy, silent, well-watered-down life, which, coming from a tree isn't really that much, however, as you know - trees aren't regular customers in the land of walking and talking, and it took quite a lot of convincing to make him come over and say that. Meow. ~ Will Advise

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandon ~ Daniel Mendelsohn

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist," nor "fugitive." In its fairy-tale--or otherworld--setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality ... In such stories when the sudden "turn" comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I love incorrectly

There is a solemnity in hands,
the way a palm will curve in
accordance to a contour of skin,
the way it will release a story.

This should be the pilgrimage.
The touching of a source.
This is what sanctifies.

This pleading. This mercy.
I want to be a pilgrim to everyone,
close to the inaccuracies, the astringent
dislikes, the wayward peace, the private
words. I want to be close to the telling.
I want to feel everyone whisper.

After the blossoming I hang.
The encyclical that has come
through the branches
instructs us to root, to become
the design encapsulated within.

Flesh helping stone turn tree.

I do not want to hold life
at my extremities, see it prepare
itself for my own perpetuation.
I want to touch and be touched
by things similar in this world.

I want to know a few secular days
of perfection. Late in this one great season
the diffused morning light
hides the horizon of sea. Everything
the color of slate, a soft tablet
to press a philosophy to. ~ Carl Adamshick

Incase the title was misleading, this is the story of Qorth. He was an alien, but he was more normal, more boring, more goofy, and more ho-hum than any human I'd ever known . . . to the point that I sometimes wonder if he was really even an alien. To be fair, he did have "magical" otherworldly powers and some weird traits, like pointed ears. It rained when he was sad. His eyes were solid black, which really creeped me out in the beginning but, eh, I got used to it. He had weird tastes in food, like he would put ketchup on pancakes, and animals were sock puppets to him. The night I found him, it was the animals who led me to him. ~ Ash Gray

A woman can be demure, lady-like and the most prim and proper character, and still have a toughness and resiliency as apparent as a superhero-type female character or a warrior or soldier type. It's all about the story, the character, and the course of events in that piece of work and how that character is presented. ~ Katherine McNamara

I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. The moral of my story may be that love is a constraint, as strong as any belt. And this is certainly true, which makes it a good moral. Or it may be that we are all constrained in some way, either in our bodies, or in our hearts or minds, an Empress as well as the woman who does her laundry ... Perhaps it is that a shoemaker's daughter can bear restraint less easily than an aristocrat, that what he can bear for three years she can endure only for three days ... Or perhaps my moral is that our desire for freedom is stronger than love or pity. That is a wicked moral, or so the Church has taught us. But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale. ~ Theodora Goss

Your life will consist of a series of times when you must reinvent yourself. We desperately cling to the idea that things should stay the same, but life and growth are about change. Don't mistake the end of a chapter for the end of the story. Lean into the plot changes, and follow your character arc. If you are in a dark part of your tale, know that this night will not last forever, but you must be brave enough to see it through. This is not the end, oh no my friend. Take courage. Better things await you. ~ John Mark Green

Look, look, we tell each other. It's Tom!

He's Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he's Tom to us. Tom! It's so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent's, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters - anyone who had a hand to be held. He had to watch so many of us die, had to say goodbye so many times. Outside of our rooms he would get angry, upset, despairing. But when he was with us, it was like he was powered solely by an engine of grace. Even the people who loved us would hesitate at first to touch us - more from the shock of our diminishment, from the strangeness of how we were both gone and present, not who we were but still who we were. Tom became used to this. First because of Dennis, the way he stayed with Dennis until the very end. He could have left after that, after Dennis was gone. We wouldn't have blamed him. But he stayed. When his friends got sick, he was there. And for those of us he'd never know before - he was always a smile in the room, always a touch on the shoulder, a light flirtation that we needed. The y should have made him a nurse. They should have made him mayor. He lost years of his life to us, although that's not the story he'd tell. He would say he gained. And he ~ David Levithan

We know what you are thinking. It is not girls who need lessons in how to talk on the telephone.
We are experts at it.
Some of us could even medal in it.
The problem is the boys. And they need to shape up.
True, true, true.
However.
The boys are not going to shape up. They are not going to read magazines or informational textbooks such as this one that tell them how to talk to girls on the telephone. And they are not going to magically figure out how to converse either. It is a demonstrated fact that even bona fide boyfriends such as Finn and Jackson and Kaleb are hit with paralyzing stupidity and boringness on the telephone, and you, my girlfriends, you are the only ones who can do anything about it.
Some tried-and-true tips
1. No feelings. Not if you can possibly avoid it. Feelings in person only.
2. No long silences. The male of the species hates long silences. If he is silent, say, "I gotta go, I'll see you later." And hang up. This is mysterious and alluring. And if it is not, at least you don't have any more awkwardness.
3. Some people will tell you that you shouldn't call guys, you should wait for them to call you. Hello? This is the twenty-first century. We can call them.
4. But have a reason. Don't call "just to talk," because they have nothing to talk about. Have a story to tell them, or ask if they watched some TV show just now, or ask about homework, or make a plan for the weekend. ~ E. Lockhart

The Bible is not, in other words, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands - though it includes plenty of both. The Bible is not simply the record of what various people thought as they struggled to know God and follow him, though it is that as well. It is not simply the record of past revelations, as though what mattered were to study such things in the hopes that one might have one for oneself. It is the book whose whole narrative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God's people risen from the dead, this should come not as a surprise but as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along. ~ N. T. Wright

That's something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don't exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.
(From the short story: The Late Novels of Gene Hackman) ~ Rivka Galchen

And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom
Come? The idea of it there,
Behind its scrim since font and fontanel,

Breaks like light or water,
Like giddiness I felt at the old story
Of how he'd turn away from the motif,

Spread his legs, bend low, then look between them
For the mystery of the hard and fast
To be unveiled, his inverted face contorting.

Like an arse-kisser's in some vision of the damned
Until he'd straighten, turn back, cock an eye
And stand with the brush at arm's length, readying. ~ Seamus Heaney

There is a story they tell of two dogs. Both at separate times walk into the same room. One comes out wagging his tail while the other comes out growling. A woman watching this goes into the room to see what could possibly make one dog so happy and the other so mad. To her surprise she finds a room filled with mirrors. The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him while the angry dog saw only angry dogs growling back at him. What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are. ~ Anonymous

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd. ~ Lesslie Newbigin

I believe almost every author have gone through the terribly uncomfortable period between the time of shedding the seeds of a story and waiting to see it flourish as a published book, spending hours watering and fertilizing it. This is a dreadful period, frustrating and depressing. ~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

So much history can be lost if no one tells the story
so that's what I do. I tell the stories. This is my way of fighting for social change. ~ Alanis Obomsawin

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. ~ Jane Hirshfield

I cannot actually see him, but there he is in my mind's eye, crouching or down on all fours, on a hillock, black clouds racing past over his head, and the hillock becomes a hill and the next minute it is the atrium of a church, an atrium as black as the clouds, charged with electricity like the clouds, and glistening with moisture or blood, and the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. The curfew was in force. ~ Roberto Bolano

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to ~ Neal Stephenson

But this, too, you could say, is part of the American story, as we have always been people who move on, leaving behind wreckage and fragments in our wake. ~ Colin Dickey

There are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside. ~ Daniel Alarcon

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story "Nightfall," about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove people mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen. ~ Roger Ebert

Without looking up to God, sinking leads to drowning. But when my eyes are locked on his, sinking tells a different story.
Drop the hands and let the knees be weak. Loosen the grip and let the arms open wide. Bow the head and let the eyes close tight. We cannot do this life. We cannot parent these children. We cannot lead this company. We cannot change this world. We cannot make this art.
Not alone. Not on our own. Not without sinking first.
In the act of sinking into God, of looking up at him from the depths of our own inadequacy, we begin to know who he is. In turn, we know who we are as well. ~ Emily P. Freeman