Stories Quotes

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

But you're an artist. you should know there's more to a story than the part happening right now.

I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.

The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people’s stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind’s ability to exercise free will. Without a character’s ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human.

I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.

Everyone's got a different story.

Sense howEven the smooth stones acheWith stories of their ownIn the shuddering light of day.

We’re not eight kingdoms, but an entire land with one heartbeat. It’s why people like you and I need to record our people’s stories so we can find those moments when our paths cross, and only then will we know true peace.

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

Such stories ask us to remember that there are little things in the world around us that we hardly notice but which contain great beauty and strength; that we might learn by taking a closer at places we already thought we knew; that we overlook important knowledge by not asking enough questions of the land around us; that some places in the wilderness are not for us to visit; that there are always small, secret wonders hiding in nature, just out of view.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

¨Everything is ordinary to us until we get know its history. We start to see things differently when we do get a glimpse of its past¨

It is customary to have vampires in stories nowadays - they are quite the norm, just like wicked stepmothers used to be. Yes, vampires have sent wicked stepmothers into retirement homes, to brew cups of tea and tend to their arthritic knees.

All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.

You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

David had left her,taking his insane jealousy with him.

A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens 'em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

History was more than just stories, he reminded himself as the men walked forward with their burdens. It taught lessons as well.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.

The problems of the past.How the problems of the past, uncorrected, inevitably became the problems of the future.

Write and your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table.

That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.

We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.

Words matter. Without words you can't have stories and without stories we would never have heard of the Greatcoats.

My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.

I can't imagine a life without a story.

Welcome, welcomePlease feel welcomedWelcome, oh welcomeWe are pleased to have you here.

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.

. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.

Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.

...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace.

It is easy to arrange the words in a story born out of a dream; for a story without a dream, a story itself is not enough.

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.

My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.

I prefer a story to a prayer.

Audiences are craving intricate and intelligent stories that keep them on the edge of their seats.