Stories Quotes - Page 17

• There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Careers, Virginia

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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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• For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

  Hannah Arendt

  Country, Simple, People

  "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". Book by Hannah Arendt. Chapter XIV, 1963.

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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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• There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.

  Rex Stout

  Book, Writing, Two

  "Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout". Book by John McAleer, p.3, 1983.

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• The incredible thing happens at the beginning of the story always, you notice, not the end. A Sherlock Holmes story is never a trick story.

  Rex Stout

  Incredibles, Ends, Holmes

  " Invitation to Learning" with Jacques Barzun and Elmer Davis; transcript in "The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times", book by Van Doren (1942), page 246, January 1942.

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• Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.

  Rex Stout

  Lasts, Detectives, Firsts

  "The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times". Book by Van Dore, p. 251, 1942.

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• If I programmed my own TV network, it would air good news! Just positive stories. Heroic stories. Cute puppy dogs doin' stuff.

  Jennifer Aniston

  Cute, Dog, Air

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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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• What the American people hope -– what they deserve -– is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills; a chance to get ahead; most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, Children, Differences

  First Presidential State of the Union Address, delivered 27 January 2010, Washington, D.C.

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• America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it's the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place. Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

  Barack Obama

  Struggle, Commitment, Sacrifice

  Announces the Death of Osama Bin Laden, delivered 1 May 2011

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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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• I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species.

  Marlon Brando

  Way, Damage, Life Is

  New York Times, July 2, 2004.

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• What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.

  Donna Tartt

  Wall, Loneliness, Yellow

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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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• There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Children, Men

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ Ultimate Collection: 120+ Works ALL in One Volume: Complete Novellas & Short Stories, Juvenilia, Poetry, Essays & Collaborations: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Outsider, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Cats of Ultharäó_”, p.240, e-artnow

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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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• No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Emotional, Order

  H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, James Turner (1976). “Selected Letters 1934-1937”, Arkham House Publishers

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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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• 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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• What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.

  Tobias Wolff

  Struggle, Writing, People

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• Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

  J. J. Abrams

  Want, Events, Building

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