The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Arundhati Roy1 quote
The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic. — Arundhati Roy · 1997Cormac McCarthy1 quote
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. — Cormac McCarthy · 1985G.K. Chesterton1 quote
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. — G.K. Chesterton · 1901Hermann Hesse1 quote
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. — Hermann Hesse · 1919Homer1 quote
Among all men on Earth, bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the Muse has taught them songs, and loves the race of bards. — Homer · 700 BCJoan Didion1 quote
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion · 1979Julian Barnes1 quote
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. — Julian Barnes · 2011Neal Page1 quote
You know everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. — Neal Page · 1987Philip Pullman1 quote
"Thou shalt not" might reach the head, but it takes "Once upon a time" to reach the heart. — Philip Pullman · 1996Ray Bradbury1 quote
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. — Ray Bradbury · 1990Raymond Chandler1 quote
When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. — Raymond Chandler · 1950Robert M. Cover1 quote
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution, there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. — Robert M. Cover · 1983Sextus Propertius1 quote
The sailor talks of breezes: the ploughman, of oxen: the soldier counts wounds, the shepherd counts sheep. — Sextus Propertius · 24 BCSherman Alexie1 quote
I never feel spiritual anywhere except in the presence of my own stories. — Sherman Alexie · 2004Susan Sontag1 quote
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. — Susan Sontag · 2003Ursula K. Le Guin1 quote
Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people. — Ursula K. Le Guin · 2002Will Bloom1 quote
A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him...and in that way he becomes immortal. — Will Bloom · 2003Willa Cather1 quote
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. — Willa Cather · 1913Zora Neale Hurston1 quote
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. — Zora Neale Hurston · 1942