top of page
"The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Story quotes

"Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across."

"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on."

"Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence."

"It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter."

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."

"Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today."

"Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place."
Explore more quotes by E. M. Forster

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself."

"Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind."
bottom of page