c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In Middle Earth a motley crew assembles to save the world as we know it. Four hobbits, two men, a dwaft, an elf, and a wizard, too. They rambled to destroy the ring in the mountains of Mordor.  Now it is you time. Dare you join this fellowship? The rules are simple. Twelve more clues will be hidden. One for each month. You have a month to solve each riddle. Plenty of time. On the full moon of each month, the next clue will be hidden. Seek it. Leave each where you found it for the next traveler. Where does this quest lead? What is the endgame? Follow and you shall find out. You must be wise, learned, disciplined, and above all, not a FROG. If you agree to join this fellowship, proceed with your first clue: MY WORDS are legend. Legends are HISTORY, My field of study.ONE BOOK only in your shire. With your strength, the book has been found, and now you must climb to the Scholar's Shrine. Four travelers begin this talle: Hlaf Elf, Troll, Halfling, and Thief. To make it to the end, you will need to build a motley crew. Find a wizard to see you through. You walk a long and winding path to find your next clue. Shall the Half Elf teache you his songs to pass the time? Perhaps that will draw an elf lord into your presence. The road is long, and the leaves do change color. You have demonstrated your strength, and your intelligence: now you must go boldly into battle. Be wise with your strategy: though it my seem like a game, there is more to the story.
— Megan Frazer Blakemore, The Friendship Riddle
Look, the truth belongs to the guy who's best at sticking to his story,' said Ferguson.
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ( "Waiting for the pieces to fall into place" )
— Erik Pevernagie
The power of your story may not lie in its drama, but in its absolutely perfect relationship to your cause.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage, Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference
You can't write a sory until you've felt. Breathe it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them. That's why you come here. To live your story.
— Angelica Banks
It’s the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don’t you?
— Larry Kramer, Faggots
Confrontation affords you the opportunity to hear the other side of the story.
— Sunday Adelaja
Who lives inside your head? The hero of your story OR The victim of someone else's?
— Tony Curl
The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .
— Christina Baldwin
If the institution of mathematics told a story . . . how would it end?
— Lindsey Drager, The Sorrow Proper
This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.
— Jonathan Galassi, Muse
Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.
— Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.
— James Purdy, Narrow Rooms
An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks
— Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain
The space between the private and the public is the nexus of the personal and the social, if not political. It’s where we meet the strong or subtle cultural censors who attempt to define what community, race, class, or gender can or cannot speak, to tell us which stories are told and valued and which are not. In short, it’s where we’re reminded of the power of personal stories and the power of the storyteller.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage, Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference
Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.
— Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors
Advocating well with a personal story is not a call to simply “Insert Story Here.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage, Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference
Every good love story has a start and a finish. What matters is what happens in the middle.
— Suzette R. Hinton
There’s always a story that people are telling about themselves, and sometimes you can get them to tell it ever so slightly differently.
— Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors
It is perhaps necessary for something dear to be lost.”“Why?”“Perhaps it is necessary to the making of a story. A story after all is a way of remembering love.
— Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors
No story is complete until it is written.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in-and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing-the only work you can do convincingly-is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.
— David Bayles
Where does the story end? That's what it's all about. It's what we all want to know.
— Sarah Dalton, Mary Hades
Then there are the optimists. The story continues, but it stays the same. The princess lives happily ever after with her prince, probably pops out a few kids and carries on the bloodline. Marriages survive, families continue, and good prevails over evil. These are the people who cannot bear deviations from the rule. Everything fits into neat little boxes. When bad things happen, they ignore it, or use some quote about everything happening for a reason, or what doesn't kill us make us stronger. They carry on without even talking about their bad experiences, pretending everything is all right.
— Sarah Dalton, Mary Hades
Somehow, the story of the book enhanced the story within it.
— Barbara Lieberman, To Miss The Stars
A recipe is a story with a happy ending.
— Daniel   Thompson, The Great Apocalypse
It’s a question of wanting to know how the story turns out. And one can only know that about one story, ever.
— Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors
As Kipling said, that’s another story...
— Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman
All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.
— Bryan Fuller
A picture may tell a thousand words but it doesn't tell a story
— Thomas Wright
Nanabozho also had the task to learn how to live from his elder brothers and sisters. When he needed food, he noticed what the animals were eating and copied them. Heron taught him to gather wild rice. One night by the creek, he saw a little ring-tailed animal carefully washing his food with delicate hands. He thought, “Ahh, I am supposed to put only clean food in my body.”Nanabozho was counseled by many plants too, who shared gifts, and learned to treat them always with the greatest respect. After all, plants were here first on the earth and have had a long time to figure things out. Together, all the beings, both plants and animals, taught him what he needed to know. The Creator had told him it would be this way.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
As I prefer to see it, there has never been an epic love story that involved significant amounts of self-control.
— Jennifer Harrison, Write like no one is reading 2
As far as I’m concerned, story is everything. It is why we get up in the morning and how we choose who to take to bed at night. Story is the thread that weaves together the very fabric of reality.
— J.K. Norry, Stumbling Backasswards Into the Light
Life is a fairytale if we know how to write the story.
— Debasish Mridha
A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.
— Christopher Morley
Writing Tip:Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.﻿
— Linda Westphal
For impact, tell your true story -challenges, victory, all. Build hope by helping others find themselves by your story.
— Bidemi Mark-Mordi
Once you know you are worthy and your story is worthy, you fight for other stories.
— Jedidiah Jenkins
The more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Tell the fucking story.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Making of Zombie Wars
The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it's better not to tell the truth.
— Louis de Bernières
There’d be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we’d die unstoried deaths.
— Adam Levin, Hot Pink
It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Our story begins at home, but it doesn’t have to end there.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.
— Italo Calvino
So, what is my story? I don't know. It's long and twisted and not quite finished yet.
— Caitlyn Paige
The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
— Rashers Tierney, F*ck You, I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome
Story to me is life. It’s purpose. We as humans have an the opportunity and obligation to live the most truthful story ever told, unfortunately so few ever live truthfully. They don’t follow their dreams and live lives filled with regrets and “what ifs”. I make it my purpose to pursue the dreams and life that I want. It’s very hard, but at the end of the day, when people read the story of my life, they will say, “He was true to himself”.
— Aaron Denius Garcia
a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
— Robert Macfarlane
Just as the way sun is behind the moon’s light reflection, I know that everything which comes into my life, or every thing I notice, I see, I hear, has a story behind it. And that story connects it to me. So I become curious to know these back stories. And the more I know them, the more I know myself, each time in a different way.
— Khadija Rupa
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
— Robert McKee
Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.
— David Levithan, Are We There Yet?
You can tell your story any way you damn well please.Its your solo.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
If I do tell you the story, the two of us will always share it. And I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. if I lift open the lid now, you’ll be implicated. Is that what you want? You really want to know something I’ve sacrificed so much trying to forget?
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Remember:It’s all in your head… all of it.If you don’t like the story, change it.If the people around don’t accept your new story; change them.
— Steve Maraboli
At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.
— Akilnathan Logeswaran
Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
— ilana Graf
You're in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
And you’re disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story.
— Paul Park, All Those Vanished Engines
His story is simple, because simple is always best.
— Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes
Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.
— Paul Park, All Those Vanished Engines
In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.
— Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift
Everyone today has a story
—  the world’s an archive.
Somehow life had become a story problem, and William was horrible at math.
— Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost
...I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.
— Glen Hirshberg
Each write the story of your life, so try writing the best you can.
— Kat Unda
It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.
— Michael Hofmann
Life is a story.
— Sagar Gorijala.
Love? ... It's at the heart of every story.
— Jessica Day George, Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow
Every tree in the forest has a story to tell. Some of them were burnt but they endured the fire and got revived; some of them were cut, their barks injured, some people pick up their leaves to make medicines for their sicknesses, birds used their leaves to make their nests, etc. Upon all these, the tree is still tree!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream
The greatest story every(any)one can tell is the story of their life. Just don't let the climax of your story be unrealized dreams.
— Unarine Ramaru
We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.
— Will Storr
Always follow your dreams. Never give up. If you have a thought in your mind write it down. If you have a desire in your heart to write, then write. Tell your story. Make a difference. Touch someone’s heart.
— S. Sloan
Lachlan frowned as he misjudged the distance and his forehead hit Cormag's head with a bump. He wrapped his arms around his neck to steady himself, two big hands reaching up to hold onto his arms as if to offer extra support. “You,” he began, talking quietly into his ear, “are so beautiful,” he confessed, resting his heavy skull against Cormag's for a moment.He meant it as well. Cormag was stunning. He was taller and broader than he was, very much the fine figure of hotness. His dark hair was well kept, but a little messy, he had amazing bone structure; the type that made him look more like a model than a museum manager. A chiselled jaw, nicely defined cheekbones and a rugged quality thatmade him so appealing. He had never noticed how handsome a male face could be until those eyes drew him in.“And so are you,” his companion chuckled, “but we discussed this…I've ruined every relationship I've ever had. I get needy, possessive and my baggage gets in the way.Besides,” he lowered his voice to a whisper and brushed his hand over his upper arm, “You're not gay,” he protested, reminding him yet again that they were different.“Nope. Not gay,” he agreed with that, nodding his head as he pulled back a little to see him better. “But that doesn't make you any less beautiful. Why is it wrong that I can see how special you are?” he asked, having difficulty understanding why part of his brainwas telling him he was being a drunken idiot and that the man before him wasn'tattractive. But the rest of his brain – about ninety-eight percent of it – was telling him that he was the most attractive person he'd ever seen.“It's not, Lachlan. It really isn't.”“But it's somehow wrong for me to tell you?” Lachlan wondered, glancing across the bar to see Matteo smiling at him. He didn't know what it meant.Cormag cupped his face, capturing his undivided attention again. “No. Not thateither. But it makes it hard for me to keep my distance. You're stunning. Inside and out,” he claimed, with chocolatey eyes that said he meant every word.
— Elaine  White, Decadent
If you are reading this, you are still alive, and, therefore, the story is not over. Something else could happen.
— Alicia Bay Laurel, How to Make Peace
Cormag caught his hand and pulled him back until they were facing each other. “I think you're amazing,” he said, blurting the words out.Lachlan smiled, completely shocked and thrilled by how captivating he found him.He had never thought this could happen to him, that he would be attracted to another boy.He thought he knew himself so well.“I think you're smart, sexy, funny as hell. You have hidden depths, Lachlan. You only need the right person to coax you out of your protective shell,” he claimed.“Are you the right person?” Lachlan wondered, as he took a half step forward.Cormag took a deep breath and brushed at a strand of hair that was sticking out at a funny angle from behind the top of his ear. He tugged at his short hair every time he talked about his recent break up. He was such a dork.
— Elaine  White, Decadent
He shook his head and thought about it for a second. “Maybe I'm not straight? Can I still be straight when I'm sitting here looking into your eyes?” he asked. Maybe it was the alcohol talking or maybe he wasn't as straight as he thought he was.“Yes. Absolutely.” Cormag nodded and watched him closely.“Even when I think they're so pretty? They are, you know. So many different shades of brown…and a little green. Just a touch; not a lot. So pretty.” He sighed happily, watching those dark eyes staring back at him in surprise. He lay his head on his arms, smiling at the way Cormag flushed in embarrassment and turned his full attention onto his bottle of beer.“Wow, you are super drunk.
— Elaine  White, Decadent
We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.
— Kameron Hurley, Rapture
My story is a sad and lonely one, and beautiful and lively and joyful. It's not perfect; it is what it is.This is a story.But it is not a fairytale.
— Eugenia Argerami, Mirror On the Wall
Mowaljarlai rarely answered questions with an abstract explanation; he always told a story. His was not a fragmented world, divided into the convenient disciplinary languages and jargon that seem to be required for the understanding of concepts and principles in, for example, mathematics, physics, art and literature. Not only did he not have these languages; he thought this was a strange way to arrive at understanding the way in which the world lives in itself. It baffled him that whitefellas developed their knowledge by busting things up, reducing things to little pieces separate from everything else that contributes to their nature. For him, everything in creation is not only living and interconnected, but exists in a story and story cycle. Yet his knowledge of what whitefellas call ‘science’ was extraordinary.”p80-1.
— Hannah Rachel Bell, Storymen
Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.
— Margo Lanagan
Give me a life time by the fire, with a book in my hand, nothing more and I will tell you a great story.
— Evelyn L. Colon
Whatever how much you know,if you don’t know, who you are, in what world you are living, or simply where you are, and from where you came from. Because if you do know, that's completely different story. 18.09.11
— VicDo
Life is a big story. Music is just one way to tell it, to realize how many tales all kinds of people share.
— Stasia Ward Kehoe, The Sound of Letting Go
When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus and Other Stories
I don't have a story," I said. "I'm still waiting for one.
— Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.
— Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red, Snow White
What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.
— Billy Marshall
the lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story
— David Whyte
[T]here is something to recommend a story that ends.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
And now the story begins for the last time.
— Daniel H. Wilson, Robogenesis
You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.
— Sherwood Anderson, Death in the Woods and Other Stories
Stories are like catechisms, but they're catechisms for your impulses, they're catechisms with flesh on.
— N.D. Wilson
Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
The people who believe themselves superior to you will reveal themselves in how they respond to criticism from you. An opinion of anyone carries as much weight as whatever value that person's social currency has. A poor man spouting words more thought provoking than plato would not be credit for his prudence for his social currency and not his wisdom decides the value of his life.
— Crystal Evans, Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis
Saved or searching, we all need to be reminded of God’s interest in us individually and His love for us personally.
— Erin K. Casey, Get Personal: The Importance of Sharing Your Faith Story
Crazy moment!! When you suddenly laughed because you remember something funny and then realised that strangers were lookin at you weirdly (why the hell he's laughin) and immediately you changed your expression to serious.
— Khaled Besrour
Remember each new day you get to turn a page in your life and write your own story. So how do you choose to write it?
— Tammy Mentzer Brown
Life is ironic. Some people use their terrible childhood as an excuse of their unfortunate rest of the life… while others create a masterpiece out of their terrible childhood, they create a story loved by the entire world.
— Nino Varsimashvili
They’re criminal, but I’m a villain in someone’s untold story.
— Rea Lidde, Haven
That story you're scared to share --- that story has the power to change both your life and the lives of others.
— Jo Ann Fore, When a Woman Finds Her Voice: Overcoming Life's Hurts & Using Your Story to Make a Difference
That's what they tell you noise is, random energy, chaotic energy . . . It's the stuff that's not data, that's not information, that's not REAL. A thing that's what it's NOT and not what it IS. Noise is chaos. But chaos is continuity. . . . There are stories in the noise.
— James W. Blinn, The Aardvark Is Ready For War
I would travel far and wide...seeing, listening, creating. I would weave tales for an enthralled audience. A song would be heard throughout the kingdom, and I would be a part of that. You would normally think that a bard would pick up his tales from stories heard in his travels or, perhaps, from personal observation of these events. Perhaps some bards would create the stories themselves or, at least, adapt the original versions heard... But what if the bard were really more than a bard? What if he were once a gallant knight or an old sea captain...perhaps even a forgotten prince? What if the stories he told, what if the characters brought to life in his stories, were really of his comrades and himself? Stories from long ago that he finally wished to be heard? What if those who listened to his tales, all the while assuming that they were far disconnected from their communicator, were really listening to the narrative of a wanderer intimately connected to it all? And where would such an individual go when his final days as an “official” bard were spent? Perhaps he would decide to retire in a lighthouse. For, surely, no place would be more fitting for the hero emeritus. He would gaze upon the glorious sea in recollection...guiding others with the beacon of light atop his home as he had once been shepherded. The adventurer became the storyteller...and then the Sentinel of the Sea.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, I Thirst
I'd prefer her story than history.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
It is your personal story that makes you relatable. Not assigning judgment, or pressing blame. Your story, wrapped in God, around his Word, and what he has done in your life will safely lead women home.
— Jo Ann Fore, When a Woman Finds Her Voice: Overcoming Life's Hurts & Using Your Story to Make a Difference
I can live without you. I just don’t wish to.” ~ Joe
— Monique DeVere, You Don't Get Joe!
Sometimes it's not just your favorite song. It's your untold story.
— Minhal Mehdi
You can rewrite your personal story!
— Mary Buchan, Over iT
We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.
— E.H. Gombrich
The waitress serving the wedding party was a short young blonde. She took their orders efficiently and delivered everyone’s food correctly. "Ifonly she knew my story," Melora mused. then she thought again, "Better yet,maybe she’s in the middle of her own story." Who knew what things might havehappened already on the island to this typical college-age waitress.
— Marie Zhuikov, Plover Landing
The waitress serving the wedding party was a short young blonde. She took their orders efficiently and delivered everyone’s food correctly. "If only she knew my story," Melora mused. then she thought again, "Better yet, maybe she’s in the middle of her own story." Who knew what things might have happened already on the island to this typical college-age waitress.
— Marie Zhuikov, Plover Landing
Stories are a kind of theme park of mortality. Deadnyland.
— James W. Blinn, The Aardvark Is Ready For War
So the gods,” Moash said, nursing his own drink, “were pleased that you solved problems on your own . . . by going to other gods and begging them for help instead?”“Hush,” Rock said. “Is good story.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Once upon a time, there was a story. But no one to tell it.
— A.D.Y. Howle
I'm Tiny And My Reach Is Limited. I Can Give YOU Only What I Have And Surely When I Give, I Don't Keep Anything For Me. To YOU, It's Nothing Probably As YOU've Got Everything. My Everything Would Be Unnoticed. It Seems Like "A Rain Drop To The Ocean".... (From The Romantic Story "Reflection of The Rainbow")....
— Muhammad Imran Hasan
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.
— Sara Sheridan
Each stroke of your fingers is a different word that describes the story. By itself it’s meaningless, but—” I pushed down on a few fingers helping her play a few notes. “String them together and you have a melody. You have a story. So, Saylor, what story do you want to tell?
— Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic
Never be afraid to share your story. No one can tell it like you can.
— Toni Sorenson
No one like the Incomplete Stories, so does the God :-)
— Raj Vanjara
No one likes incomplete story, so does the God :-)
— Raj Vanjara
some stories are sudden like an inhale, some are overcoming like the tides, some, we name mistake, some are called lessons. Stories...tragic, romantic, comedy. We make them, they make us .
— Upasana Banerjee
Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.
— Sara Sheridan
Nothing’s worse than a story without an end.
— Samantha Shannon, The Bone Season
We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
— Brené Brown
If the characters are not wicked, the book is." We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the giant. Stories with fiery serpents and leviathans and sermons in whirlwinds. Stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections.
— G.K. Chesterton
So what’s your story?” Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. “My story?”“Yeah. Everybody has at least one.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
Stories in themselves are not automatically good
—  it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.
This was not a love story that ended in tragedy.This was a tragedy that ended in a love story.
— Rachel Higginson, Love and Decay, Vol. Two
...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to the idea, I felt like I was losing my mind. Ideas would pop into my head in the middle of the night, or during a midterm, and I missed them, quite narrowly, almost every time. Every time an idea left my mind without taking the shape of a word on paper, my mind would automatically begin to churn something just as impressive, or at least close to it. I was digging myself into a shallow grave, and I was getting nowhere. And this was even before the thoughts were committed to paper.
— Leigh Hershkovich
Coincidences
—  mix-ups
Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.
— Michael J. Kannengieser, The Daddy Rock
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
— Emma Thompson
Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
How did I discover saccharin? Well, it was partly by accident and partly by study. I had worked a long time on the compound radicals and substitution products of coal tar... One evening I was so interested in my laboratory that I forgot about my supper till quite late, and then rushed off for a meal without stopping to wash my hands. I sat down, broke a piece of bread, and put it to my lips. It tasted unspeakably sweet. I did not ask why it was so, probably because I thought it was some cake or sweetmeat. I rinsed my mouth with water, and dried my moustache with my napkin, when, to my surprise the napkin tasted sweeter than the bread. Then I was puzzled. I again raised my goblet, and, as fortune would have it, applied my mouth where my fingers had touched it before. The water seemed syrup. It flashed on me that I was the cause of the singular universal sweetness, and I accordingly tasted the end of my thumb, and found it surpassed any confectionery I had ever eaten. I saw the whole thing at once. I had discovered some coal tar substance which out-sugared sugar. I dropped my dinner, and ran back to the laboratory. There, in my excitement, I tasted the contents of every beaker and evaporating dish on the table.
— Constantin Fahlberg
Behind every drama is a good story...behind every tear is the person who wrote it.
— Faye Hall
Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
— Allie Condie
Books,' I say sleepily. 'They don't change either. If you read a book and look at it again later on, it's still the same thing. But it's exciting all over again.
— Truus Matti, Departure Time
One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.
— Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game)
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
It's not that I don't believe you," Peter managed. "I'm sorry. It's just that...it's only a story.""Perhaps." She shrugged. "And perheps someday someone will say those very words about you, Peter. What do you say to that?
— Justin Cronin, The Passage
People who are left alone tell the story but are never a part of it; those who are a part of the crowd, are story bound, acting upon the role assigned to them in the theater of living, loving and longing.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
Every heart has a story to tell. Some dreams have wings, some are torn at the seams and just sit there on the shelf. If you were to walk in my shoes, you would see that we are all the same. So find the love inside yourself because every heart has a story to tell.
— Sara Haze
Truth only has one story, while a lie has a dictionary.
— Ryan Trinder-James
Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.
— N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent
A true love story has no endings.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all, in the end, to make my own story find its finish.
— Sarah Dessen, Dreamland
I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life’s novelties. We’ve all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets. I’d always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside.
— Christopher Hawke, Unnatural Truth
But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.
— Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself,"Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--""Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor."Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones."Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open.For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream."Bricks," he whispered, very low--"old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps agranary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses' drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms burstingthrough the rotting leaves; and--and--and--""Any parsnips?" asked Gub-Gub."No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips whatever.
— Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle
In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from the city. When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall. Then, in his absence she worked over the profile, deepening, so that she might enjoy his face, and remember. One day the father slapped some potter’s clay over the gouged plaster; when the clay hardened he removed it, baked it, and "showed it abroad" (63).
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Our love story is not written yet, it is mix of stupidity, fun and devotion.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
The words we construct, the poems we write and the songs we sing, become the love story of a stranger we have never seen.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Our stories are not new; yet, in the retelling we are reborn as heroes.
— Harley King
A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
The shortest distance between two people is a story.
— Patti Digh, Four-Word Self-Help: Simple Wisdom for Complex Lives
When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.
— Karen Healey, Guardian of the Dead
Once upon a time there was a man with no heart. Drifting through black-and-white life, caring naught for those hurt, and never, ever allowing another near enough to hurt him. Until, on the least likely day, the most unlikely place, the man with no heart met the most surprising person. He was fearless. He was strength and power. He wore his heart boldly on his sleeve. The man with no heart began, shockingly, to feel a movement in his breast. A stretching, a slow, steady beat...
— Shannon Noelle Long, Second Coming
Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.
— Leonard Michaels
I love books where I can't wait to turn every page, songs that grab me the first time I hear them, and films that make me totally forget about the craft because I am totally engaged in the story.
— John Grooters
there grew up around the campfires stories of a great silver stallion seen galloping over wind-packed snow way up on the Ramshead Range
—  of a ghost horse that drank at the Crackenback River
All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.
— Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
Legends of the Silver Stallion had been told for years now, whenever mountain stockmen met round the campfires or on the winding hill tracks. Songs were sung about him to the cattle and both songs and tales had become even stranger since his supposed death when he vanished through the wind and the night over a great cliff. Tales kept cropping up of a ghost horse seen, or imagined, roaming over the mountains at night, of stockmen waking in a hut at midnight, hearing the tremendous stallion’s cry which could only be Thowra’s
— Elyne Mitchell
Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?
— K. Hari Kumar, When Strangers meet..
Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.
— Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything
Propositions are to stories (and to reality) as powdered milk is to what comes from the udder. Propositions are dried-out stories with much of the vitality removed. They may say something technically true, just as powdered milk is still technically a form of milk, but they do not win our hearts and are not enough on which to nourish a life.
— Daniel Tayler
Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.
— Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter
He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.
— Darren Shan, A Living Nightmare
Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.
— Stephenie Meyer, The Host
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
The ability to see our lives as stories and share those stories with others is at the core of what it means to be human. We use stories to order and make sense of our lives, to define who we are, even to construct our realities: this happened, then this happened, then this. I was, I am, I will be. We recount our dreams, narrate our days and organize our memories into stories we tell others and ourselves. As natural-born storytellers, we respond to others’ stories because they are deeply, intimately familiar.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage
We're all born an empty page.
— Lauren DeStefano
The enormity of problems like hunger and social injustice can certainly motivate us to act. We can be convinced logically of the need for intervention and change. But it is the story of one individual that ultimately makes the difference—by offeringliving proof.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage
Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice