Stories Quotes - Page 38

• How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

  Virginia Woolf

  Ghost Stories, Feelings, Our Love

  Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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• It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

  Toni Morrison

  Mother, Children, Father

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• Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

  Maurice Sendak

  Artist, Illustration, Ego

  "Sendak at 50" by Selma G. Lanes, www.nytimes.com. April 29, 1979.

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• The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

  Gloria Steinem

  History, Silence, Waste

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• For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

  Gloria Steinem

  Girl, Gossip, History

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• The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.

  Gloria Steinem

  Mistake, Dogma

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• I do not know if Alice in Wonderland was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'-is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.

  Lewis Carroll

  Believe, Flower, Book

  Lewis Carroll (2015). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Other Tales”, p.208, Race Point Pub

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• Nostalgia is also a trait of the organizations that I call lodges - everything from corporate cultures to religious sects. Their bonding power often exceeds loyalty to family or country because they create intimacy through shared ideals and beliefs, ceremonies, stories, and legends, and depend on it for their survival. The message is clear: Don't question what we're doing. Just appreciate how long we've been doing it.

  Jennifer James

  Loyalty, Country, Religious

  Jennifer James (2012). “Thinking In The Future Tense”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

  Isak Dinesen

  Half, Tales, Bad Things

  Isak Dinesen (2002). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.337, Penguin UK

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• Caution is the lower story of prudence.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Caution, Prudence

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• The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

  Katherine Paterson

  Art, Writing, Past

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• A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

  Katherine Paterson

  Children, Mean, Unique

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• a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.

  Katherine Paterson

  Strong, Writing, Ideas

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• The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.

  Katherine Paterson

  Years, Ideas, Together

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• I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.

  Katherine Paterson

  Writing, Heart, Ideas

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• Where there's a will there's a detective story.

  Carolyn Wells

  Detectives, Detective Stories

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• When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

  Carolyn Wells

  Book, Writing, Long

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• the announcement that you are going to tell a good story (and the chuckle that precedes it) is always a dangerous opening.

  Margot Asquith

  Storytelling, Announcements, Dangerous

  Margot Asquith (1934). “More Or Less about Myself”

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• And we need to share our story. Not with everyone but with someone. There is someone who is like you were. And he or she needs to know what God can do. Your honest portrayal of your past may be the courage for another's future.

  Max Lucado

  God, Courage, Honesty

  Max Lucado (2011). “The Lucado Inspirational Reader: Hope and Encouragement for Your Everyday Life”, p.111, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

  John Dryden

  Real, Essence, Fiction

  John Dryden, John Mitford (1847). “The works of John Dryden in verse and prose”, p.329

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• Now, to tell my story--if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,--I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends.

  Charles Kingsley

  Wall, Book, Communication

  Charles Kingsley (1860). “Two years ago ... Third edition”, p.18

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• ...the story of a man who saw three fellows laying bricks at a new building:
  He approached the first and asked, What are you doing?
  Clearly irritated, the first man responded, What the heck do you think I'm doing? I'm laying these darn bricks!
  He then walked over to the second bricklayer and asked the same question.
  The second fellow responded, Oh, I'm making a living.
  He approached the third bricklayer with the same question, What are you doing?
  The third looked up, smiled and said, I'm building a cathedral.
  At the end of the day, who feels better about how he's spent his last eight hours?

  Bill Vaughan

  Feel Better, Men, Thinking

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• Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

  Meg Greenfield

  Drama, Simple, Reality

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• [On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

  Dorothy Parker

  Party, Apples, Errors

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• I have heard a good story of Charles Fox. When his house was on fire, he found all efforts to save it useless, and, being a good draughtsman, he went up to the next hill to make a drawing of the fire,--the best instance of philosophy I ever heard of.

  Robert Southey

  Philosophy, Drawing, Fire

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