Don’t let them tell us stories. Albert Camus
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die. Thomas Hardy, In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’ 1915, from Moments of Vision (1917)
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. Vladimir Nabokov
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,
Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d. William Shakespeare, Richard II III ii 155
I will a round unvarnished tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration, and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter. William Shakespeare, Othello I iii 90
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ’scapes I’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travel’s history. ibid. I iii 34
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. ibid. I iii 143
My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange;
’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful. ibid. I iii 158
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them. ibid. I iii 167
I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain. Clive Barker
This is a story about coming to America … This is the next story. Revenge of the Green Dragons 2014 starring Ray Liotta & Justin Chon & Shuya Chang & Harry Shum & Kevin Wu & Leonard Wu & Billy Magnussen & Eugenia Yuan & Jin Auyeung & Joanna P Adler et al, directors Andrew Lau & Andrew Loo
L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? — A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick — And one of the best of its kind I ever heard. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Off-licence owner: I used to suffer from stories.
Customer: Really, when?
Off-licence owner: Oh once upon a time. Monty Python’s Flying Circus s3e11, BBC 1973
When you’re in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all but only a confusion. Dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood. Like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids. And all aboard are powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all when you’re telling it to yourself. Or to someone else. Stories We Tell, 2012
Every family has a story. ibid.
Mum was doing plays. And she met Michael in one of those plays. ibid.
Dad says mum wanted sex a lot more than he did. ibid.
This marriage had grown stale … He knew he disappointed her. ibid.
One day someone said Sarah did not look at all like her father. ibid.
This actor in the play might have been the father. ibid.
There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Game of Thrones s8e6: The Iron Throne, Tyrion, HBO 2019
Sirens screaming, a warrior driven by revenge, a sun in search of a father, and the trickiest journey home you could ever imagine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is not some twentieth-century urban rhyme, it’s one of the greatest stories ever told. Homer’s Odyssey has been ricocheting around the world for thousands of years. Akala’s Odyssey, BBC 2019
The central theme of the Odyssey is the irresistible urge to return home. ibid.
‘We have the name, we have the poems, and we have lots of stories from Antiquities.’ ibid. Professor Barbara Graziosi, Durham University
The Greeks actually believed the Odyssey took place. ibid.
The most powerful story from Odysseus’ wanderings is his descent into the realm of dead souls – the underworld. ibid.
He’s [Homer] responding to what’s gone before. ibid.
When Odysseus himself returned home after twenty years he found that his palace was under siege by a gang of local nobles. ibid.
I don’t give a fuck about telling my story. Charles Manson, cited Charles Manson: The Final Words
‘Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American. But his palate was incredibly wide, and delicious, and violent, and brutal, and ugly. All of those things.’ Hemingway I, Michael Katakis, writer, BBC 2021
Ernest Hemingway remade American literature. He pared story-telling to its essentials. Changed the way characters speak. Expanded the worlds a writer could legitimately explore, and left an indelible record of how men and women lived in his lifetime. ibid.
Behind the public figure was a troubled and conflicted man who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family with its own drama and darkness and closely held secrets. ibid.
‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.’ ibid. Hemingway
‘You see, I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across. Not to just depict life, or criticise it. But to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well. Hemingway II
With the help of sympathetic friends, Hemingway would publish two slender books, three stories and ten poems, and In Our Time. ibid.
By the time A Fairwell to Arms topped the best-seller list in 1929 colourful stories had already begun to circulate about Ernest Hemingway, many of them told by the writer himself … It became harder and harder to tell the real Hemingway from the one he had created. Hemingway III
‘All stories if continued far enough end in death.’ ibid.
What was happening in his beloved Spain was beginning to change his mind. It was now being torn apart by a civil war. Early in 1936 reactionary elements of the army eventually led by a fascist general named Francisco Franco and supported by wealthy industrialists, great landowners and the Catholic Church joined forces to try to overthrow the duly elected socialist government. Hitler provided Franco and his rebels with bombers and fighter planes and German pilots to fly them. Their goal was to terrorise the civilian population. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dispatched tanks and nearly 80,000 troops. Within weeks, Franco’s forces had seized one third of the country from those faithful to the government … Between 30-40,000 men from more than 50 countries would answer the call. ibid.
When the writer Martha Gellhorn, a family friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, introduced herself to Ernest Hemingway at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s in December 1936 she was 28 years old, 9 years younger than he. Hemingway IV
Hemingway’s sons would come to visit and begin to get to know the woman with whom their father was openly living. ibid.
When For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, Marxist critics attacked the novel as a betrayal of their cause because it showed sympathy for the war’s victims on both sides. ibid.