story « Quotenik

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story

“Knowing about a good story you haven’t read is like watching for a comet.”

Eudora Welty

source: letter to William Maxwell, Spring 1957, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Marrs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 110.

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category: anticipation, reading, story

medium: Letter

“When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.”

Jeanette Winterson

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source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 8.

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category: creative process, silence, story, writing

medium: Memoir

“Everybody has a crow story.”

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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source: Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 67.

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category: bird, crow, nature, story

medium: Nonfiction

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

Eudora Welty

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source: One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14.

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category: childhood, listen, story, storytelling

medium: Memoir

“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 him to read the story.”

Flannery O'Connor

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source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 96.

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category: story, words, writing

medium: Nonfiction

“Mr. White: If you get that story done, I’ll take steps to get you a new cushion for your chair.”

Harold Ross

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source: note written to E. B. White, encouraging him to finish an essay, and quoted in “A Note to Our Readers,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, 40.

category: cushion, deadline, E. B. White, incentive, story, work, writing

medium: letter

“It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

Gail Caldwell

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source: Let’s Take the Long Way Home (New York: Random House, 2010), 3.

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category: death, friendship, love, share, story

medium: memoir

“The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.”

Truman Capote

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source: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 20–21.

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category: nature, orange, shape, story, writer

medium: interview

notes: Originally published in Issue 16 of The Paris Review, 1957.

“No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.”