Anecdotes Stories Quotes & Sayings

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books. — Lauren Weisberger

Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to. — Peter Block

Life is too long to reject the opportunities in front of you every day. — James Altucher

I felt the familiar warm tingling at the center of my chest and had just enough time to gasp as some invisible hand yanked me forward, smacking my forehead against the dashboard with enough force to stun me dumb.
Chubs slammed on the brakes, forcing my seat belt to do its job and lock against my chest. I was thrown back into my seat, an explosion of colors bursting in my vision.
"Oh, hell no!" Chubs roared, slamming a hand against the steering wheel. "That's it! We don not use our abilities on one another, goddammit! Behave yourself! — Alexandra Bracken

The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the "shaggy dog stories" and "stupid pet tricks" that are commonplace pleasures of life. — Marjorie Garber

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about. — Alice Munro

Every culture feels like their parents are the most stringent as far as, "We came to this country to work hard, we want you to be a doctor or a lawyer." — Ato Essandoh

Well, politics is much more severe than entertainment. You have to hit those points, in politics, word for word. You have to remember the date. You have to remember the website. You have to rehearse stories that might be asked, have anecdotes ready for questions that might come up. — Matt Walsh

I identify with women more than men. I guess I have a strong feminine side. — Lenny Kravitz

I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me ... anecdotes. But never a joke. — Lucille Ball

The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt ... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else. — Rebecca Solnit

Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses. — Jim Hightower

Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me. — Tucker Max

We walk until there aren't more houses, all the way to the part of the beach where the current makes the waves come in then rush back out so that the two waves clash, water casting up like a geyser. We watch that for a while and then Scottie says, "I wish Mom was here." I'm thinking the exact same thought. That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too. Every day I kept track of anecdotes, occurrences, and gossip, bullet-pointing the news in my head and even rehearsing my stories before telling them to Joanie in bed at night. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. — Alice Munro

My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth. — Gray Davis

Keanu Reeves is, like, the worst actor I've ever seen. I can't believe he's a movie star. — Juliana Hatfield

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization. — Bruce Sterling

We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories]. — Terence McKenna

If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view. — Mary Karr

I am therefore a ready believer in relics, legends, and local anecdotes of goblins and great men, and would advise all travellers who travel for their gratification to be the same. What is it to us whether these stories be true or false, so long as we can persuade ourselves into the belief of them and enjoy all the charm of the reality? — Washington Irving

I was kind of reflecting on my life and certain experiences, and you know, when I'm teaching and coaching my partners on 'Dancing With the Stars,' I sort of use those stories and anecdotes to help them sort of overcome certain fears. — Derek Hough

I was strongly encouraged by a science teacher who took an interest in me and presented me with a key to the laboratory to allow me to work whenever I wanted. — Frederick Reines

all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. — Neel Mukherjee

Maybe I'm inclined to what Nietzsche called "impure thought," that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can't disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called "philosophy," should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were. — Roberto Calasso

I have strong interests in supporting sport, primarily football, and also in developing cultural relationships within national communities and their diasporas, with special reference to Ethiopia. — Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger. — Chuck Palahniuk

This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash. — Hanif Kureishi

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. — Rebecca Solnit

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject. — E.B. White

Bill Pearson is definitely a man to talk to, especially in the afternoon when he's had a couple of drinks because he's got so many stories and anecdotes. — Duncan Jones

I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing. — Jill Kargman

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year. — Joyce Carol Oates

The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker. — Stephen King

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. — Mignon McLaughlin

Use of No Use is Great Use. (Chuang Tzu) — Sung Yee Poon

The space center's proximity to my backyard came to signify an intersection between heaven and hell. Florida was somewhere between the two; it was America's phantom limb, a place where spaceships were catapulted out into the cosmos. Alligators emerged from brackish water. Vultures and hawks circled above. Mosquitoes patrolled the atmosphere at eye level. We shared an ocean with sharks and dolphins. There were no seasons, only variations of humidity. Time slithered, festering in a damp wake of recollections.

I believed in the Bermuda Triangle. I thought it would move in over Florida one night. By dusk an unknown force would vaporize us through a tear in the atmosphere. We'd be stuck, wandering in a parallel version of the same place, unaware that we were dead but dreaming.

People came here to vanish. — Paul Kwiatkowski