Story Books Quotes

1. "My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four poster bed. ~pgs 217-218; Buckley's childhood"
Author: Alice Sebold

2. "It's time to grow uo. You might want some showdown like in the storybooks, but this is not a storybook. This is war. And I can tell you, as someone who watched our families blown out an air lock with my own eyes, war doesn't have a happy ending. Not for anyone."
Author: Amy Kathleen Ryan

3. "The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious"
Author: Anatole France

4. "Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore."By telling you my life's story."See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!orBECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday."I am tomorrow."
Author: Aravind Adiga

5. "To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells."
Author: Arundhati Roy

6. "When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?"
Author: Audrey Niffenegger

7. "I also need you to "spread the word," quietly, that if any harm should come to Antanasia during my imprisonment, I will not only tear down these walls stone by stone, but -- once freed -- shatter the rule of law and destroy, with great satisfaction, anyone who arouses in me even the slightest suspicion. Indeed, if so much as one hair on my wife's head is disturbed while I cannot protect her, this kingdom will see retribution that will go down in the history books -- to be read by the very few who remain standing. - Lucius"
Author: Beth Fantaskey

8. "If you read all your history books, there are no women in them."
Author: Caitlin Moran

9. "If I don't tell it all now, the story in the history books will always be imperfect and that would be wrong."
Author: Christine Keeler

10. "I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters."
Author: Christopher Koch

11. "Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years."But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none."That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale."
Author: Derek Sivers

12. "I hadn't gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I'd been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I'd figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I'd come to accept it.And I understood that it didn't make them any better than me."
Author: Diana Peterfreund

13. "Eichenwald, Kurt. Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story. New York: Broadway Books, 2005."
Author: Edward D. Hess

14. "I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.They'd tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck - and it hadn't worked out well from what Harry recalled. Maybe he needed to dust off some of those history books his father had bought him, and see if what had gone wrong with the French Revolution was something easy to fix."
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

15. "You're mine now, Harry thought at the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers; and all the lands and people of wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world; and the entire greater universe of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed. I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies."What are you smiling about?" inquired Professor McGonagall, warily and wearily."I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution," explained Harry. He was carefully memorising the exact words of his ominous resolution so that future history books would get it right."
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

16. "It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened."
Author: Elizabeth Kostova

17. "My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history."
Author: Ellen Tauscher

18. "I had read history too closely, read of Caesar and the Roman Empire. I had not noticed that in the books there were white spaces between each line; the white spaces are there to remind you of the unspoken, unwritten truth. When one only reads the words and does not read what is not written in the book, then one will never learn to understand."
Author: Erik Christian Haugaard

19. "'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told."
Author: Frank Miller

20. "It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany."
Author: Gene Simmons

21. "The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who...''Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.''I don't remember that.''The history books gloss it over."
Author: Graham Greene

22. "For a sweeter kiss had never been bestowed upon a girl. Not in storybooks or real life.Not in heaven or hell."
Author: Gwen Hayes

23. "Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

24. "A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books."
Author: Henry Ward Beecher

25. "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) - that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly."
Author: Howard Zinn

26. "Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all."
Author: Jane Austen

27. "Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print."
Author: Jill Lepore

28. "Carol and I have found that unless God baptizes us with fresh outpourings of love, we would leave New York City yesterday! We don't live in this crowded, ill-mannered, violent city because we like it. Whenever I meet or read about a guy who has sexually abused a little girl, I'm tempted in my flesh to throw him out a fifth-story window. This isn't an easy place for love to flourish. But Christ died for that man. What could ever change him? What could ever replace the lust and violence in his heart? He isn't likely to read the theological commentaries on my bookshelves. He desperately needs to be surprised by the power of a loving, almighty God. If the Spirit is not keeping my heart in line with my doctrine, something crucial is missing. I can affirm the existence of Jesus Christ all I want, but in order to be effective, he must come alive in my life in a way that even the pedophile, the prostitute, and the pusher can see."
Author: Jim Cymbala

29. "At many points during our nation's history, there have been times - known in our history textbooks as 'panics' - when adverse conditions affecting the financial and economic sectors of the country have caused individuals to hoard more than they need."
Author: Jo Bonner

30. "I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book."
Author: John Grisham

31. "Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn't know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men--sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagra with a teacup."
Author: John Jakes

32. "I Need a Good Book I need a good story.I need a good book.The kind that explodesOff the shelf.I need some good writing,Alive and exciting,To contemplate all by myself.I need a good novel,I need a good read.I probably needTwo or three.I need a good taleOf love and betrayalOr perhaps an adventure at sea.I need a good saga.I need a good yarn.A momentous and mightilyOr slight one.But with thousands and thousandsAnd thousands of books,I need someone to tell meThe right one. -John Lithgow"
Author: John Lithgow

33. "The world has held great Heroes,As history-books have showed;But never a name to go down to fameCompared with that of ToadThe clever men at OxfordKnow all that there is to be knowed.But they none of them knew one half as muchAs intelligent Mr Toad!The animals sat in the Ark and cried,Their tears in torrents flowed.Who was it said, "There's land ahead?"Encouraging Mr Toad!The Army all salutedAs they marched along the road.Was it the King? Or Kitchener?No. It was Mr Toad!The Queen and her Ladies-in-waitingSat at the window and sewed.She cried, "Look! who's that handsome man?"They answered, "Mr Toad."
Author: Kenneth Grahame

34. "It was all here for me, just as it has all been here for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.People so smart you can't believe it, and people so dumb you can't believe it. People so nice you can't believe it, and people so mean you can't believe it."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

35. "As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . ."
Author: Lee Gutkind

36. "I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has."
Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

37. "What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written."
Author: Mark Twain

38. "Reluctantly Bastian's thoughts turned back to reality. He was glad the Neverending Story had nothing to do with that.He didn't like books in which dull, cranky writers describe humdrum events in the very humdrum lives of humdrum people. Reality gave him enough of that kind of thing, why should he read about it? Besides, he couldn't stand it when a writer tried to convince him of something. And these humdrum books, it seemed to him, were always trying to do just that.Bastian liked books that were exciting or funny, or that made him dream. Books where made-up characters had marvelous adventures, books that made him imagine all sorts of things.Because one thing he was good at, possibly the only thing, was imagining things so clearly that he almost saw and heard them."
Author: Michael Ende

39. "It is over with; I am in the history books."
Author: Michael Moorer

40. "Can you imagine? Fourteen-hundred-year-old views of history determining how neighbors interacted in the twentieth century? No. You can't. Because history here is a dead thing. Something captured in books that schoolchildren have to endure and which they forget about the moment the books are closed. In Pakistan, every conversation, however personal, is punctuated by the raspy, decrepit gasps of the past breathing down your neck; every generation has to fight out all the old arguments that have been fought before."
Author: Nafisa Haji

41. "If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows."
Author: Niall Williams

42. "Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day.""Not in the history books," said Valentine."Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father."
Author: Orson Scott Card

43. "I'm living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks."
Author: Patty Duke

44. "The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books."
Author: Paul J. McAuley

45. "For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse."
Author: Peter Ackroyd

46. "I am told that César Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas. Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

47. "I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times."
Author: Sandra Cisneros

48. "It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds."
Author: Terry Pratchett

49. "According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles."
Author: Terry Pratchett

50. "I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually — I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any."
Author: Wallace Stegner

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