A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week.”
Source: Letters
“A story does that: it will reach out and hook somebody and hold them for just a few moments while you unpack this story in their presence.”
“A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.”
Source: Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Firsts: (The Way of Kings, Mistborn: The Final Empire, Rithmatist, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians)
“A story had no owner ship. A story could break its bones, grow wings, soar out of reach and dive out of sight in the time it took just to draw breath. It meant we weren’t walking a cut path. We carved it into existence with
every step.”
Source: A Crown of Wishes
“A story has a vital starting point, a centric dynamism, and centrifugal force that propel its nerve impulses outward.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“A story has been thought to its conclusion when it has taken its worst possible turn.”
“A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.”
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
Source: The End of the Affair
“A story has the opportunity to enlighten us, because as we connect the extraordinary moments on film with the ordinary moments of our lives, we ask ourselves, "What am I going to do the next time I'm scared? What would it be like to say goodbye to my family for the last time?"”
“A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.”
“A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.”
“A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivété - that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. It reflects itself in joy and grief, in my fathers sudden knowledge that he would not live to protect me, and in his determination to leave behind a part of himself - his spirit, his humanity - to illuminate my path, give light to my darkened world. He carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again.”
Source: In the Shadow of the Banyan
“A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people.”
“A Story in the Ink
"Can the past arise from the grave?
If not, then what is in a story?
A tale, a hallowed ground
where silent memories still remain,
the bones among the heaps of dust.
'Break, break, break!' it says,
The story, to the sleeping tomb,
and the ink falls, the spoken word,
to bloom and blaze in oblivion.
Beneath the soil, they lay asleep,
But the trembling hands wove at last,
There they woke, living voices,
There they walked in a land of light.”
“A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.”
“A story is a burden which must be carried with as much care as we carry a sleeping child”
Source: Roots of Survival: Native American Storytelling and the Sacred
“A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
“A story is a life. It has a life of its own. It's a baby. It's helpless.”
Source: Becoming the Conjurer
“A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.”
Source: South of Broad
“A story is a seed — plant it with love, and it will grow in a child’s heart forever.”
“A story is a story is a story. The only difference is in the techniques you bring to bear. There are always limitations on what you can and can't do. But I enjoy that. Just like when you write a sonnet or haiku, there are rules you have to abide by. And to me, playing within the rules is the fun part. It keeps the brain fresh.”
“A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.”
“A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.”
“A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.”
Source: Letters of Ayn Rand
“A story is an invitation, and a challenge, and a choice.”
Source: Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
“A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“A story is built on characters and reasons.”
“A story is how we construct our experiences.”
“A story is just a convoluted lie...with some hidden truths.”
“A story is like a feather blowed around by the wind. Some folks see that feather and say, “Oh, there’s a feather,” that’s all. One day a man pick that feather up and weave it into his gbo, the thing that protect his house from bad spirits. The same way with a story. One day a man picks it up and makes it his own. Then it is true.”
Source: The African
“A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.”
Source: And the Mountains Echoed
“A story is like an egg, a universe contained in its chosen medium. The spark of something new and different but fully formed and fragile. In need of protection. You want to protect it, too, but there's more to it than that. You want to be inside it (...). You want to be in the story, not observing it from the outside. You want to be under the shell. The only way to do that is to break it. But if it breaks, it is gone.”
“A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.”
“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.”
“A story is not an escape from the world—it is a return to it, through the wild path of empathy.”
“A story is not finished, until it took the worst turn.”
“A story is not just words on a page—it is a heartbeat that refuses to be silenced”
“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
Source: Selected Stories
“A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.”
“A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.”
“A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.”
Source: Short stories
“A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world.”
“A story is told as much by silence as by speech.”
Source: A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
“A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature.”
“A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.”
“A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.”
“A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken”