Our Story Quotes

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
- Lynn Abbey

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
- Chinua Achebe

remember when God has answered you, it no longer matters who has been against you but for Him to answer you and change your story, you have to make up your mind to disobey the wrong order, change the status quo and BE DIFFERENT!
- Jaachynma N E Agu

Only God can write the end of your story.
- Mitch Albom

Tell your story: Yes, tell your story. Show your example. Tell everyone it's possible, and others shall feel the courage, to climb their own mountains.
- Paulo Coelho

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?
- Jodi Picoult

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.
- Kevin J Anderson

What you and I might rate as an absolute disaster, God may rate as a pimple-level problem that will pass. He views your life the way you view a movie after you've read the book. When something bad happens, you feel the air sucked out of the theater. Everyone else gasps at the crisis on the screen. Not you. Why? You've read the book. You know how the good guy gets out of the tight spot. God views your life with the same confidence. He's not only read your story...he wrote it.
- Max Lucado

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.
- Max Lucado

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.
- Plato

When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
- Isaac Asimov

Free yourself from the inauthenticity and disempowerment of your story.
- Steve Maraboli

Once you start recognizing the truth of your story, finish the story. It happened but you're still here, you're still capable, powerful, you're not your circumstance. It happened and you made it through. You're still fully equipped with every single tool you need to fulfill your purpose.
- Steve Maraboli

In our story logic which we're making up, if we're saying he's alive, then like a quadriplegic who's in bed he can move his head and shoulders, but he can't move his arms. If he could just turn on that power to his legs and arms, the nerves could get through and he could walk.
- John Badham

But for the last couple of weeks I've had this bizarre sensation that something is watching me. (Simone)
You mean someONE, right? (Tate)
I know it sounds crazy (Simone)
I just had a body walk off the table mid-autopsy and you think your story is nuts? (Tate)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

Lick my finger so I can scan your table of contents- fuck the index- I yearn to ride your story line.
- Brandi L Bates

Live your life fom your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and heal people's souls.
- Melody Beattie

It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.
- L M Montgomery

Steep are the seas and savaging and cold
In broken waters terrible to try;
And vast against the winter night the wold,
And harbourless for any sail to lie.
But you shall lead me to the lights, and I
Shall hymn you in a harbour story told.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.
- Hilaire Belloc

Be open to suggestions, but don't let anyone dictate how you should tell your story. Who can possibly tell your story better than you?
- Giuseppe Bianco

The person you need to please the most with your story is yourself.
- Giuseppe Bianco

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.
- Francesca Lia Block

I want to be part of your story. I want your story to rearrange the symbols in my mind. I want your voice to be my voice.
- David Bowles

Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, It's my own business.
- Madeleine L Engle

There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.
- Chester Brown

Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is how all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever
- Nicholas Sparks

Honest. It's almost always best to go with honest. It means you never have to worry about getting your story straight.-Harry Dresden
- Jim Butcher

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.
- Gloria Naylor

Our life is a blank book and we are the authors......... Write and shape your story as much as the mind can imagine it
- Jason Calder

Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike.
Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.
- Jonathan Carroll

My family's story isn't special. What's special is the America that makes our story possible. Ours is a nation like no other, a place where great journeys can be made in a single generation. No matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.
- Julian Castro

How sad it must be for you to be nothing more than a hollow statue, to have your tomb preserved and your story forgotten.
- David Levithan

Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
- Robert A Heinlein

This is a cruel thing to do because when someone knows your story they know you. And they can hurt you. It's why I give mine away in pieces, even to Cassia.
- Ally Condie

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it to remember, to keep in mind as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain to the end of the story and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.
- Frank Conroy

It's not the time we spend but how we spend the time that truly tells our story.
- Tonya Hurley

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Kurt Vonnegut

The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story-not just as Irish people but as flesh and blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it-that's what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from.
- Frank Delaney

See," he began, leaning back into the booth, "I was at this car dealership today, and I
saw this girl. It was an across-a-crowded-room kind of thing. A real moment, you know?"
I rolled my eyes. Chloe said, "And this would be Remy?"
"Right. Remy," he said, repeating my name with a smile. Then, as if we were happy
honeymooners
recounting our story for strangers he added, "Do you want to tell the next part?"
"No," I said flatly.
- Sarah Dessen

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
- Graham Greene

Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
-Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)
- Ani Difranco

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
- Helen Dunmore

Just because someone has bought or read your book, this does not give them a right to be mean or insulting to you. So they didn't like your story? BFD! And having a Good Reads account does not instantly qualify someone as a literary expert. Isn't it enough to say you didn't like a story and why? Instead they made broad, sweeping characterizations, labeling authors as incompetent or amateur. Sometimes it is not the author who lacks competence but rather the reader.
- Jeff Erno

Yeah, apparently this chick didn't know-" He held up a hand.
"Thank you, but I came to hear your story, not theirs," he took a bite, chewing and swallowing, "You see, stories are endless; there is always something before the beginning and after the end. They can branch off and follow any character. But because we ourselves can't see the whole story, we have to cut it up into novellas. You see?
- Melanie Fair

If you're honest with yourself as a writer, trying to tell the best story you can, your story will be an honest one. And your values will come out, no matter how hard you try to disguise them.
- Joe Clifford Faust

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.
Can we tell a new story?
- Jonathan Safran Foer

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.
- Dorothea Benton Frank

Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can
make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the
now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is
necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same
principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now
of your storyfully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner
conflicts, and so oncontinue to apply.
- James N Frey

Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. 'He might tell me how my story ends,' he murmured.
Meggie looked at him in astonishment. 'You mean you don't know?'
Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn't particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. 'What's so unusual about that, princess?' he asked quietly. 'Do you know how your story ends?'
Meggie had no answer for that.
- Cornelia Funke

What's the matter princess? Do you know the end of your story?
- Cornelia Funke

What's so unusual about that, princess?" he asked quietly. "Do you know how your story ends?
- Cornelia Funke

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
- Neil Gaiman

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.
- Neil Gaiman

Tell your story. Don't try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people's voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there will always be better writers than you and there will always be smarter writers than you, but you are the only you.
- Neil Gaiman

Trust your heart, trust your story.
- Neil Gaiman

Remember your name. Do not lose hope what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. When you come back, return the way you came. Favors will be returned, debts will be repaid. Do not forget your manners. Do not look back.
- Neil Gaiman

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
- Neil Gaiman

Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.
- Terry Goodkind

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiotin this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undeaddeciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.
- Mira Grant

I'm pretty ruthless about that; I think when you sign over your story, you sign over your story.
- Rachel Griffiths

In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.
- John Grisham

If you walk across my camera I will flash the world your story.
- Woody Guthrie

How I keep trying to force our story into a fairy tale, but from the beginning, it's been more like a nursery rhyme."
"Bizarre and adorable?"
"Just like you."
"With rings in your pockets and bells on your toes"
"Ooh, I should really invest in some toes bells.
- Shannon Hale

We didn't exactly believe your story, Miss O'Shaughnessy, we believed your 200 dollars. I mean you paid us more than if you had been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it alright. (Sam Spade)
- Dashiell Hammett

We didn't exactly believe your story.'
Then--?'
We believed your two hundred dollars.'
You mean--' She seemed not to know what he meant.
I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.
- Dashiell Hammett

When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country.
- J K Rowling

He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.
- Leanna Renee Hieber

There are definitely some stories worth telling and I think there's something to be said for telling your story.
- Susanna Hoffs

I once told Ren our story wasn't over.
And it's not.
Not yet.
- Colleen Houck

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.
(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)
- A E Housman

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.
- Helen Humphreys

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.
- Helen Humphreys

Nora, I believe life's like a good book. Time makes up the pages that will be your story. Every time your life changes, you start a new chapter. To me, there's nothing more depressing than someone getting to the end of their days and realizing they've only written one long, boring passage.
- Elizabeth Isaacs

I don't want to die, said February. This is what is going to happen, said the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. She walked over to February and whispered something in his ear.I hope that works, said February. I really do.
I'd do it for you. I'd change our entire story if I could, she said. Our story, said February, is all wrong.
- Shane Jones

Don't tell me to write your story. Write your own story. If you won't write it down, it probably isn't worth writing downor reading.
- Jarod Kintz

Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.
- Sam Keen

Once you've crossed over into that realm of nothingness, your story only really stays in the minds of those closest to you. And when they too vanish..
- Douglas Kennedy

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.
- Barbara Kingsolver

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.
- Nigel Kneale

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays..
- Carmen Laforet

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?
- Anne Lamott

Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
- C S Lewis

Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.
- C S Lewis

One's options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad. Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution, for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow. They're part of the same journey our story.
- Lori R Lopez

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.
- Louis Malle

The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it -- and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.
- Beryl Markham

Tell your story.
That's the secret of immortality. The one true way to live forever.
- Brad Meltzer

the times we worked harder to make the day stand out.
our story demanded that we change and so we did.
- Donald Miller

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
- Bill Moyers

Well then," Faye said. "Now that you've heard our story, we have just one question to ask you." She fixed Cassie with an odd half smile and said in a sweet, false voice, "Are you planning to be a good witch or a bad witch?
- L J Smith

The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."
Tone?'
The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened.
- Tim O Brien

How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words.
Never to doubt that you will live to utter them.
Never to doubt that you will tell your story.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Bad things can happen, and often do--but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages.
- James A Owen

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.
- Marisha Pessl

Sing your song
Dance your dance
Tell your story
I will Listen and remember
- Utah Phillips

I wanted you to thank you for being my friend and letting me play a part in your story.
- Christopher Pike

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
- Katherine Anne Porter

Indeed if we Christians so tell our story that Judaism is silenced, then we have not spoken rightly of Christ.
- Timothy Radcliffe

One of the things we've always tried to do is help others with our story. Whether it's with the infertility issues, whether it's with the breast cancer, we said we're gonna turn these negatives into positives. And if we can help others by sharing our story, then it's worth it.
- Bill Rancic

Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.
- Robert Redford

On the first page of our story
The future seemed so bright
Then this thing turned out so evil
I don't know why I'm still surprised
Even angels have their wicked schemes
And you take that to new extremes
But you'll always be my hero
Even though you've lost your mind
- Rihanna

We are the Edema Ruh, and the thing we value most every man possesses. You can tell us your story.
- Patrick Rothfuss

We're special because dreams that are impossible anywhere else, come true here. That's not just my story. That's your story. That's our story.
- Marco Rubio

Perhaps you're not finished with your story, and who knows if you'll ever finish it or not. Honestly, it's not that important.
- Miguel Angel Ruiz

When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.
- Miguel Angel Ruiz

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
- Karen Russell

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
- Karen Russell

Our story is a 'once upon a time', but it's not a 'happy ever after'.
- Rupert Sanders

The reason for my discomfort was simple. Our story - however romantic I could make it sound in my head - sometimes sounded a little tawdry in the re-telling. There was no escaping the fact that I'd been living with the father of my child when we met; that I'd cheated on him, then left; that what James and I now shared was born out of the ruins of another relationship.
- Catherine Sanderson

I don't want to tell your story because you're a insensitive, self-centered moron. I've told a lot of stories about young people, and I always feel there's hope.
- Joel Schumacher

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb
- Jeanette Winterson

Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.
- Walt Shiel

I've been rereading your story. I think it's about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that's okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
- Richard Siken

In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.
- Jefferson Smith

Your fear remains strong. You are not ready to face your story, preferring instead to surround yourself with knots. Someday, they will strangle you.
- Maria V Snyder

No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about...One thing's for sureno one but you can be the hero of your story.
- Jerry Spinelli

Grief is the tribute we pay the dead," she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. "But they don't ask more than we can afford to give. They've never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they're part of our story, and we of theirs.
- S M Stirling

Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad.
- Courtney Summers

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child
- Miguel Syjuco

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
- Orson Welles

The biggest thing is to let your voice be heard, let your story be heard.
- Dwyane Wade

So yo then man what's your story?
- David Foster Wallace

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.
- C K Webb

Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.
- Margaret J Wheatley