Story Not A Box Quotes & Sayings

Maybe John will come with me wherever it is I go, but whenever I picture the open highway, my only companion is a box of mix tapes. I decide to write a new story for Monday, one that looks to the future rather then the past, about a woman who starts a new life by making off with a stolen sports car, an Alfa Romeo spider convertible, and she drives west from Jersey to California, robbing banks and evading the law and breaking stereotypes and hearts. — Michael Kardos

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight. — Cathleen Schine

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends. — Ashly Lorenzana

Here's a story, and you don't have to visit many
houses to find it. One person is talking,
the other one is not really listening.
Someone can look like they are but they're
actually thinking about something they
want to say, or their minds are just
wandering. Or they're looking at that
little box people hold in their hands these
days. And people get discouraged, so they
quit trying. And the very quiet people,
you may have noticed, are often the sad
people. — Mary Oliver

But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style. — Ali Smith

No one writes a story like Lydia Davis. In the years since she began publishing her lyrical, extremely short fiction, she has quietly become one of the most impactful influences on American writers, even if they don't know it. That's largely because she makes economy seem so easy. You could read several of her stories into a friend's voicemail box before you were cut off (and you should). You could fit one of her stories in this column. Some you could write on your palm. — Jonathan Messinger

When you see and know that your wellspring is an Eternal Source, and not other people around you, or your past experiences, not even your life story, that is when you are able to truly give to others, without running out and without feeling empty. Because I see God in everything that I touch and feel and think and because I believe that He sees me in everything, too, hence I am able to give to others without thinking of myself as limited source. What I have doesn't come from others, it doesn't come from my life story and it doesn't come from a box. What I have comes from a wellspring, an Eternal Source. The good news is that it never runs out, there is plenty for all and for everyone. — C. JoyBell C.

Once upon a time, [ ... ]. There was a world that was perfectly made and full of birds and striped creatures and lovely things like honey lilies and star tenzing and weasels
[ ... ] And this world already had light and shadow, so it didn't need any rouge stars to come and save it, and it had no use for bleeding suns or weeping moons, either, and most important, it had never known war, which is a terrible and wasteful thing that no world needs. It had earth and water, air and fire, all four elements, but it was missing the last element. Love.
[ ... ]
And so this paradise was like a jewel box without a jewel. There it lay, day after day of rose-colored dawns and creature sounds and strange perfumes, and waited for lovers to find it and fill it with their happiness. The end.
[ ... ]
The story is unfinished. The world is still waiting. — Laini Taylor

From the box she removed a lightsaber. Finn eyed it uncertainly, but even in the poor light, Han recognized it immediately. Luke Skywalker's lightsaber. "Where'd you get that?" Han demanded. "Long story. A good one - for later. — Alan Dean Foster

Over the years, with all the experience, I've become more mature about the subjects I pick. I have a better understanding of what works at the box office. Once the story is finalised, I surrender to the director and follow him. After that, my performances speak for themselves. — Mahesh Babu

Every poker player, like every fisherman, needs to have a story in a box, and most poker stories are completely uninteresting. — Jason Alexander

The little box that was given to me was by no means unique. I'd heard of prayer boxes, and I knew what they were for.
... Any scrap of paper will do, anywhere, anytime of the day or night. The important part, in a world of fractured thoughts, hurried moments, and scattershot prayers, is to take the time to think through, to write down, to clarify in your own mind the things you're asking for, the things you're grateful for, the things your're troubled about, the hopes you've been nurturing.
And then?
Put them in the box and ...
Let. Them. Go.
That's what trust is. It's letting go of the worry. It's the way of peace and also the way of God. such a hard road to travel for people like me, who are worriers. When I'm writing a story, I control the whole universe. In life ... not so much. Actually, not at all. Things happen that I hadn't anticipated and wouldn't choose and can't change. That's the tough part. — Lisa Wingate

I'm a storyteller - that's my chamber, that's my box. I'm always tryin' to give you the best story from our side of the table that you could really relate to quick. I understand where I wanna be at, but sometimes the production takes me where I need to go. — Raekwon

I've heard the story about the woman who opened the box and let havoc grab a choke hold on the world. — Alex Adams

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of anything. — Richard Siken

One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it ... There is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography or anecdotalism, or simply slice up their texts and deliver them to their publishers in a cardboard box, if they are not so politically placed as to need emancipatory knowledge. — Terry Eagleton

There's definitely a delicate line you have to walk in telling someone else's story that's not quite as delicate in telling your own story. I think when I'm working on a personal story, there's less pressure to try to get it exactly right. — Box Brown

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. — Bob Hamilton

There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch.
"This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come."
"Why is that?" says Frog.
"No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me."
Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together."
Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later.
Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship. — Amy Andrews

Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction ... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem. — Neil Gaiman

The human life cycle no less than evolves around the box; from the open-topped box called a bassinet, to the pine box we call a coffin, the box is our past and, just as assuredly, our future. It should not surprise us then that the lowly box plays such a significant role in the first Christmas story. For Christmas began in a humble, hay-filled box of splintered wood. The Magi, wise men who had traveled far to see the infant king, laid treasure-filled boxes at the feet of that holy child. And in the end, when He had ransomed our sins with His blood, the Lord of Christmas was laid down in a box of stone. How fitting that each Christmas season brightly wrapped boxes skirt the pine boughs of Christmas trees around the world. — Richard Paul Evans

So you fell out of the sky, too? the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

I am not light nor the absence of it. I am the broad spectrum. Everything that makes you think, want to touch, or taste. Don't box me into that life that you so desperately need to be black and white because that's not me; I won't fit. I am bold, brilliant, and beautiful, I will sparkle and shimmer every hue. Ever changing. Undefinable. So do not give me limits or make me try to fit. There is no containing subtle softness careening into the harsh and dominant, every faucet creating a reaction which will cause you to feel and know you are alive. - Kendal Waller — Kendal Waller

A man should be more original than a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates. Flowers die and sugar sticks to your hips like a permanent record to a criminal. — Dannika Dark

The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office. — Kenneth Branagh

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story. — John Dufresne

The Scottish sun, shocked by having its usual cloudy underpinnings stripped away, shone feverishly, embarrassed by its nakedness. — Stuart Haddon

I'll be a story in your head. That's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Did I ever tell you that I stole it? Well I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back. — Steven Moffat

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump. — David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech

You can be my avenging knight. Ooh! That's what Princess X needs next: an avenging knight."
"You think?"
"I've already decided. Your armor is gold, and you're carrying a black battle-ax . . . I say we make you a redhead. You've got a little red in your hair, someplace. When the sunlight hits it just right."
"We're in Seattle. How often does the sunlight hit anything?"
"Walgreens is just right down the street. We could get a box of dye. It'd surprise the heck out of your dad."
"You're going to make me do this, aren't you?"
"No, May. I'm not going to make you do anything, except help me finish the story. — Cherie Priest

There is a possibly apocryphal story that in Southeast Asia, people catch monkeys by placing a banana in a box with a hole in the bottom and hanging the box from a tree. The monkey reaches in and grabs the banana but is unable to withdraw its hand. The clenched fist holding the banana is too big to fit through the hole. To escape, all the monkey has to do is release the banana. Sometimes, the monkeys hold on for a long time and are then captured. People, too, often give up their freedom by holding on to things too long. — Carl Greer

To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don't. — Dorothy Allison

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough. — Carolyn Wells

But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before. — J.P. Delaney

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on. — Jodi Picoult

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn't be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly. — Kara Martinelli

Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside. — Thomas Canty

Apparently, when people travel between dimensions, their physical forms are "no longer observable," which is a quantum mechanics thing, and explaining it involves this whole story about a cat that's in a box and is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box, and it gets seriously complicated. Never ask a physicist about that cat. — Claudia Gray

Our governor in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, once told a story about his grandma. She said, "Don't call people 'the poor.' Call people broke. Broke is temporary." I try not to say "the poor" because it sounds like a sentence, like I'm putting people in a box, far away from those of us who can make ends meet. But someone who is broke, on the other hand, is a peer. — Molly Phinney Baskette

There were the things he used to sustain life: a box of fish food. And the things he'd used to take it: a pair of nickel-plated handcuffs. — Lionel Dahmer

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it's usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It's a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there's a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything
intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music's like that."
From "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation" by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440. — Derek Bailey

l'after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l'interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end. — Alexis Munier

IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE IN
I have been thinking about the man who gives in.
Have you heard about him? In this story
A twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small wind
And the pine bends all the way over to the ground.
I was persuaded," the pine says. "It was convincing."
A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agrees
To drown all her children. "What could I do?"
The cat said. "The mouse needed that."
It's strange. I've heard that some people conspire
In their own ruin. A fool says, "You don't
Deserve to live." The man says, "I'll string this rope
Over that branch, maybe you can find a box."
The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,
I need twenty thousand corpses." "Tell you what,"
The General says, "we have an extra battalion
Over there on the hill. We don't need all these men. — Robert Bly

You pulled one story from your head, and another story popped up in its place, like tissues from a box. — Eileen Pollack

I think of the New Testament story of the woman with an issue of blood--specifically of her hand reaching out into the clutter and chaos of a crowd, not sure that she would reach Christ, but nevertheless reaching for him in hope. Her story is sacred to me because she truly believed that by reaching outside of the bounds that her culture had set for her--perhaps even the bounds she had set for herself--she could be made whole. — Ashley Mae Hoiland

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her — Edith Wharton

We wait until Pandora's box is opened before we say, "Wow, maybe we should understand what's in that box." This is the story of humans on every problem. — Peter Singer

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you. — A. Merc Rustad

You may think this a strange story, but it is not. There are people whose lives are every bit as unusual as Bobby Box's
I can promise you that. Not all of them end as well, of course. For many people, the world is a place of sadness and sorrow, which is a great pity, as we have only one chance at life, and it is very bad luck if things do not go well.
But even if you think they are not going well, you can still wish, as Bobby Box did. And sometimes those wishes will come true, as his did, and the world will seem filled with light and happiness. That can happen, you know. So never give up hope; never think things are so bad that they can never get better. They can get better, and they do. And if you have the chance to make things easier for another person, never miss it. Stretch out your hand to help them, to cheer them up, to wipe away their tears. Stretch out your hand as that man and that woman did to Bobby Box. Stretch out your hand and see what happens. — Alexander McCall Smith

I'm all about the crossover. The role doesn't necessarily have to be white or Latina or black. It could be anything. But it's hard in Hollywood, because sometimes it's all about the box office. Or all about looks and things like that. It's not about the story that they have to tell. — Rutina Wesley

I guess you never know what's going to come at you in life, but the answer is never to crawl into a box and throw in the towel. There is good that can come from anything, even if it's just a later laugh and a good story. — Lindsey Stirling

It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together? — Anais Nin

A story is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that would cover the whole floor of a room with its tiny pieces. Buts it's not that sort of puzzle that comes with a box. There is no lid with a picture on it so that you can see what the puzzle will look like when it's finished. And you have only some of the pieces. All you can do is keep looking and listening, sniffing about in all sorts of places, until you find the next piece. And then you'll be amazed where that next piece will take you. Suddenly your puzzle can have a whole new person in it, or it can go from being on a train to a hot air balloon, from city to country, from love to sadness to loneliness and back to love. Pieces can come to you at any time. When you're having a cup of tea or sitting on a bus or talking with a friend.it will be like a bell going off in your head. That's what comes next you'll think. And that's why it's serendipity. Serendipity is luck and chance and fate all tumbled into one. — Angelica Banks

The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after — Tim Powers

Every February, (Charles)Shultz drew a strip about Charlie Brown's failure to get any valentines. Schroeder, in one installment, chides Violet for trying to fob off a discarded valentine on Charlie Brown several days after Valentine's Day, and Charlie Brown shoves Schroeder aside with the words "Don't interfere
I'll take it!" But the story Schulz told about his own childhood experience with valentines was very different. When he was in first grade, he said, his mother helped him make a valentine for each of his classmates, so that nobody would be offended by not getting one, but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, and so he took them all home again to his mother. — Jonathan Franzen

At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage. I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong. I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die.
You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. — Jonathan Franzen

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God ... a way to tell the story.
It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played. — Ali Smith

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it. — Isabel Allende

After we'd filmed one series of 'Kiss Me Kate,' everyone was saying: 'The guy's got great comic timing,' - that was the first I'd heard of it. I'm not a comedian, I don't want to depend on a singular box of tricks. I like story and characters, to take on world views that are not my own. — Darren Boyd

As a reader, I'm often put off by authors and story-lines without families or children and all of the angst and joy they bring with them. — C.J. Box

I love how you can shoot a movie in a month or two or three of four, and it's this encapsulated story that you box up and ship out into the world, and what it is, is what it is. — Steven Strait

I remember the way his eyes pinned my body against the backdrop of Paris as if I was some rare butterfly pinned to an exhibit box. — Rebecca Paula

Look for the copper tablet-box,
Undo its bronze lock,
Open the door to its secret,
Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read it,
The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings. — Stephanie Dalley