Stories Quotes

And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.

When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.

Stephen King

I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.

Herbert Rosendorfer

The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.

Shandy L. Kurth

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.

Donald Miller

You can never know enough about your characters

W Somerset Maugham

...the making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer...

John Geddes

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

William Kittredge

All Stories are True.

John Edgar Wideman

It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.

Robert Michael Pyle

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

Dennis Covington

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Margaret Thatcher

This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

Emma Donoghue

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

Erin Morgenstern

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

Ben Okri

We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply...

Neil Gaiman

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.

Roberto Bolaño

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

Theodora Goss

I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts. It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.

Catherynne M. Valente

Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Richard Russo

Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

Randy Alcorn

The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

Annette Simmons

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

Zadie Smith

He. Does there have to be a he? It seems weak and unoriginal doesn’t it, for stories told by girls to always have a he?

Rinsai Rossetti

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Lisa Cron

When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said.

Michel de Certeau

My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.

Elizabeth Hernandez

Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.

Nora Raleigh Baskin

Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.

Habeeb Akande

People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.

Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

Anaïs Nin

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

Salman Rushdie

In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.

Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Graham Swift

But bad luck makes good stories.

Bernard Evslin

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

Robert Moss

This is not the way these tales end," Calliope said firmly."This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales," Amatus said, "but since ours is not yet told, we cannot count on it. There were a hundred dead princes on the thorns outside Sleeping Beauty's castle, and I'm sure many of them were splendid fellows.

John Barnes

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

Cormac McCarthy

That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

Margaret Atwood

There's always more to the story, Catriona," She replied. "That's the wonderful thing about stories.

Heather Vogel Frederick

God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh?

Tom Spanbauer

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?

Terry Moore

There's more to stories than it seems at first looking," she said. "Two sides to most stories. Folks better be thinking about that for once.

Augusta Scattergood

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.

Barry López

Have I heard all the stories I need to hear?" she asked, stupidly. But he answered as if it were a good question."No, you haven't. But you don't have time to hear any more from me. So listen for stories wherever you go. It won't always be someone telling them; sometimes they come in other ways. And Summer, when you tell yourself stories, make them true. And make them surprising. That's how you will know they might be true.

Katherine Catmull

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

Stant Litore

It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.

Melville Davisson Post

Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.

Leslie Ford

Maybe like the never-ending stories within stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, life is dream within dream all the way through?

H.M. Forester

Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans.

Scott Westerfeld

We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.

Mani S. Sivasubramanian

I have stories. But stories are not facts.''I like stories. Love them, actually. Most of the time they're better than facts.

Morgan Rhodes

And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.

Erin Morgenstern

A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is tastounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered tbefore, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a ttrain, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, tpainted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls tup the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Ben Okri

We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive.

Alexis M. Smith

History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.

Catherynne M. Valente

1 2 3 … 22 Next

Stories Quotes

Related Topics