“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.”
“Life is a story.”
“It s not about people believing the story. It s about you knowing and holding it to be true.”
“Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose.”
“...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.”
“Each write the story of your life, so try writing the best you can.”
“Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness. Within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those of us who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The end is the best part of any story”
“Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else s. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you re slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It s a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn t bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.”
“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.”
“They’re criminal, but I’m a villain in someone’s untold story.”
“Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He died on March the 20th, 1727, after more than eighty-four years of more than average bodily health and vigour; it is a proper pendant to the story of the quart mug to state that he never lost more than one of his second teeth.”
“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?”
“That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.”
“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.”