Stories Quotes - Page 19

• Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Humanity, Autobiography

  "The Grammar of Story". Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, 1981.

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• If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

  Randall Jarrell

  Wish, Beggar, Ifs

  Randall Jarrell (1965). “A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables”

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• The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  School, College, Paper

  "A Message About Messages". Personal Website, www.ursulakleguin.com.

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• If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?

  Hannah Arendt

  Life, Thinking, Doe

  Hannah Arendt, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (2007). “Reflections on Literature and Culture”, p.271, Stanford University Press

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• In her final months Princess Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these same papers were astonished by the millennial wave of emotionalism that swept the country ... One paper had a print-ready story about what a slag the Princess was, and they had to pull it at the last moment. It was replaced with an image of Diana as an angel, ascending to heaven.

  Martin Amis

  Country, Princess, Sleep

  " Martin Amis: 'The press is more vicious than the populace'" by Geordie Williamson, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2014.

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• Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Lovely, Looks, Afar

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• I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at.

  John Grisham

  Writing, People, Lawyer

  1994 In the Independent on Sunday, 5 Jun.

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• In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.

  Barack Obama

  Simple, Odds, Yes We Can

  Barack Obama, (2008). “Change We Can Believe In”, p.222, Canongate Books

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• It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Thinking, Ideas, Doe

  Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 505), 1996.

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• Although we may come from vastly different stories and very different walks of life, we are one people who possess common values and common ideals; who celebrate individual excellence but also share a recognition that together, we can accomplish great and wonderful things we can't accomplish alone.

  Barack Obama

  Together We Can, People, Excellence

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• The head of a Pike, served at supper, is said to have caused the death from terror of Theodoric the Goth, who imagined the fish's features to be those of Symmachus, a man he had just killed. But for this story, we of today would have no idea what Symmachus looked like.

  Will Cuppy

  Men, Ideas, Today

  "The Pike". "How to Become Extinct". Book by Will Cuppy, 1941.

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• This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Law, Forever, Way

  "Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U.S. 157, 181". Judicial opinion, 1943.

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• One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Race

  Letter to "Weird Tales" editor Edwin Baird, printed in "Weird Tales" 3, no. 3 (March 1924); Quoted in "Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 122), 2000.

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• I've always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane.

  J. J. Abrams

  People, Insane, Relatable

  "Director J.J. Abrams feels lucky to land 'Force' job". Interview with Rick Bentley, www.fresnobee.com. December 16, 2015.

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• I love stories where the impossible appears believable, plausible and real. Maybe it's silly, but it's one of the reasons Michael Crichton's writing always appealed to me: he took outlandish ideas and made them seem completely within the realm of possibility. I remember reading "Jurassic Park" and feeling like: "Oh, yeah - no, that's totally happening right now. They're bringing back dinosaurs!"

  J. J. Abrams

  Real, Silly, Reading

  "J. J. Abrams: By the Book". The New York Times Interview, www.nytimes.com. October 24, 2013.

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• Speaking of things that'll make your head explode, "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" finally made it to the drive-in

  Joe Bob Briggs

  Dragons, Made, Made It

  "Dragon (1993) review" by Joe Bob Briggs, www.joebobbriggs.com. July 18, 2010.

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• And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

  Harry Chapin

  Cutting, Knives, Lips

  Song: Story of a Life, 1980

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• [Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato.... He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, " Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.

  Plato

  Mother, Plato, Alive

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• Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your promise was my prayer Your hypocrisy my nightmare And your problems fill my present Are we both going somewhere?

  Harry Chapin

  Country, Prayer, Passion

  Song: There Only Was One Choice, Album: Dance Band on the Titanic, 1977

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• Marriage is like a book. The whole story takes place between the covers.

  Mae West

  Marriage, Book, Whole

  "Fictional character: Marlo Manners". "Sextette", www.imdb.com. 1978.

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• No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.

  Isaac Asimov

  Dust, History, Lapses

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• 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

  Bible, Book, Writing

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• A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Mind Love, Kind, Love Story

  Geoffrey Chaucer (1966). “The Canterbury Tales”

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• Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

  Clint Eastwood

  Couple, Giving, Car

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• The only book I ever read cover to cover was The Pete Rose Story. I read half of The Lou Gehrig Story and then made a book report on it for four straight years.

  Pete Rose

  Book, Years, Rose

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