Stories Quotes - Page 12

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

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told.

John Crowley

Genres are what holds each story together and help it along, but in no way should it ever be treated as a boundary, especially for a reader. If I’ve only read science fiction books, I would probably consider myself mad.

Lauren Lola

People think "monsters" are born without origin. But it is the monsters that have the greatest stories to tell...

Charles Lee

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.

Elizabeth Wein

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

Stephen Helmes

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, “You’re going to die, you know.” However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.

Thomas Ligotti

Not every story is true. And sometimes the things that were wicked become the things that save us, and the things that were good doom us to misery and pain.

Kelly Barnhill

Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man's mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the new-born world!It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same; and still our own bitter experience and heart-breaking regrets teach us to sympathize too feelingly with a tale like this.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

C.G. Jung

I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.

Robert Coover

Grace will meet you in the valley, and her song will carry you home on the wind to another sky filled with ethereal beauty unfolding and love everlasting.

Shannon L. Alder

Book is the best friend, have no demand, no complain

Avi Salmon

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

Alessandra Torre

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

Stephen King

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

John Geddes

The stories I tell myself about myself are contexts for what I believe is possible. These stories affect not only my attitudes about myself and others, but affect my behavior in what could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sharon Weil

Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.

Johnny Rich

...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Heather Anastasiu

Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there.""In the stars?" Bailey asks."No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now.

Erin Morgenstern

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Anna Funder

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

Sara Sheridan

Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.

Margi Preus

There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.

David Mitchell

But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.Aren't we?

Patrick Ness

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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.

Bruno Bettelheim

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.""How terrible," said Farukhuaz."Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way.

G. Willow Wilson

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

Milan Kundera

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Rebecca Solnit

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.

George Saunders

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)

Samuel Beckett

Your kindness, beauty, and simplicity remind me the stories about angels, and I was told they are just legends and myths.

M.F. Moonzajer

If there is such a thing as a universal--and I wasn't ready to throw all of mine out the window--it's that there is power in a story. And if someone pays you such a kindness as to make up a tale so you'll enjoy a gingersnap, you go along with that story and enjoy every last bite.

Clare Vanderpool

I wish stories were kinder to their characters," Maddie said. "But I guess trouble is more interesting to read about.

Shannon Hale

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.

Shannon L. Alder

All we have is compassion and stories.

Barry López

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

Shannon L. Alder

Someone is pounding on a door within you and hoping for an answer. They want to tell us the secret tale of ourselves. The stories we’ve never told. Some African tribes believe if you were to tell someone your entire story the audience would actually become you. From then on, the only life the teller would have would be in and through the listener. Some believe this is the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. How I wished for my story to be blemish free. How I wished to be a good-natured soul giving back to the world, regardless of how broken I was. In the end, it’s those things we are willing to die to change that sculpt our story. Some people open the floodgates of their minds and hearts so memories burst forth like water through a breached dam. Pieces of our lives can be found among the floating wreckage, and somewhere, the presence of God hovers over the surface of the deep. Inside, I am treading, biding my time, waiting for the magic I thought I owned as a child. Many seek this enchantment. I sought my wife, daughter and the power to conjure hope.

Christopher Hawke

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

Mary E. DeMuth

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.

Madeleine L'Engle

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.

Haruki Murakami

Magic is the most interesting art because people not necessarily want to learn to paint after they see a great painting, but they want to learn magic after they see a great magic effect.

Amit Kalantri

First rate magician perform first rate magic effects, second rate magician performs third rate magic effects.

Amit Kalantri

Your eyes, ears and mind are imperfect in front of magic.

Amit Kalantri

Magician is the best storyteller in the world.

Amit Kalantri

Think like magician, present like magician and perform like magician.

Amit Kalantri

Magic is a very beautiful mystery. Even the ages old magic effects still surprises the most modern men.

Amit Kalantri

Magicians and Mentalist predict the future because they create it.

Amit Kalantri

Many stories begin with a dream, but it is rare when the dream is the story itself.

K.M. Randall

I had said before that all stories were magic. It had never occurred to me that all magic was stories.

Jim C. Hines

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

Italo Calvino

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

Neil Gaiman

Elephant wanted no part of Rupert Panther. Rather, he wanted Rupert Panther to have no part of him, which was a realistic concern because Rupert was looking at Elephant like a gambler coming off a marathon poker game in Las Vegas looks at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, like he has something to settle with a tall stack of pancakes, and he's all business and all fork.

T.A. Young

You should never turn down the offer of another man’s story,’ the fox persisted, moving off a little further into the trees ahead. ‘Stories are the only thing that separates us from the animals after all.

T.B. McKenzie

A well told story can be magic. Let me show you...

JoLynne Valerie

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Siri Hustvedt

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Stories Quotes - Page 12

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