Stories Quotes - Page 19

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.

Dejan Stojanovic

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Vera Nazarian

Our eventual fate will be the sum of the stories we told ourselves long enough.

Crystal Woods

I know who you are,” he says.Something about his tone causes my heart of smoke to flicker in response, and I throw my guard up. “Oh? And who, O boy of Parthenia, am I?”He nods to himself, his eyes alight. “You’re her. You’re that jinni. Oh, gods. Oh, great bleeding gods! You’re the one who started the war!”“Excuse me?”“You’re the jinni who betrayed that famous queen—what was her name? Roshana? She was trying to bring peace between the jinn and the humans, but you turned on her and started the Five Hundred Wars.”I turn cold. I want him to stop, but he doesn’t.“I’ve heard the stories,” he says. “I’ve heard the songs. They call you the Fair Betrayer, who enchanted humans with your . . .” He pauses to swallow. “Your beauty. You promised them everything, and then you ruined them.

Jessica Khoury

During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” 41 • Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.” Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.

Steven Pinker

The worst stories usually make you think: 'but nobody had to die'.These are called true stories.

Moonshine Noire

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

Tim O'Brien

All single people are not really singleThey all have untold stories behind the scene.

Ahmed Ali Anjum

What a life we live. Full of questions, adventures, stories, mistakes, good, quests, bad, miracles, lessons, people, blessings, journeys, inventions, music, animals, history, cultures, religions, prophecies, planets, stars, careers, movies, plants, hate, love, and so much more.

Jonathan Anthony Burkett

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

Brian Doyle

We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?

Paula Hawkins

Our stories always contain average, ordinary people. They are the most unsuspecting victims of all.

D.J. Weaver

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.

Melina Marchetta

A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.

Rasmenia Massoud

If you are having private thoughts and ask an intimate friend to listen to them in privacy or on a date will that be considered too intimi-dating? And if the thoughts are proved to be untrue, but your friend still insists on believing in them anyway, would that be considered a cons-piracy?

Ana Claudia Antunes

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

Virginia Woolf

Without a best friend to tell stories to, it almost didn't matter if they even happened.

Leila Howland

We call a story about love a love story. We call a poem about love a love poem. Well then, my dear, aren’t our lives love lives?

Kamand Kojouri

Some stories are incomplete but they are beautiful...

Avijeet Das

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.

Criss Jami

One day, you muster the courage and let go of the fear. In a brief moment of insanity, you give wings to the stories you had wanted to tell; some you didn't even know were in you. In that instant, something about you changes. You are born again.

K.J. Kilton

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Love awakens the soul.

A.D. Posey

Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.

Donna Goddard

The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

Natalia Jaster

Don't judge me by my books. They're not my voices, and they were never my stories to tell.

Nadège Richards

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.

Laini Taylor

It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.

Laini Taylor

I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.

Avijeet Das

It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better.

Sebastien de Castell

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation

Kilroy J. Oldster

Hey, pretty book, why don’t you lie in my lap awhile?

Richelle E. Goodrich

This book is a story, and like all stories, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?''Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.''Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?''A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?''Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End.

Lucy Adlington

Thus far, the only people who can grant you immortality are not scientists, but writers. By writing you into their books, they may not only immortalize you, but also grant you superpowers.

Charbel Tadros

Warning...well-loved stories are habit forming...

Nanette L. Avery

Living your life is a long and doggy business. . . . And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.

Anne Fine

...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me -- just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable....

Amal El-Mohtar

Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters

D.Kadie

But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. ""But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does.""No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.

Matt Ruff

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

Scarlett Thomas

Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.

Sei Shōnagon

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize 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 as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

Ernest Hemingway

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O'Brien

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." (A Teller of Tales)

W.B. Yeats

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

Alberto Manguel

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.

John Connolly

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.

Neil Gaiman

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

Emma Donoghue

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

Stefanos Livos

The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously – so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected.t“They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!”tFleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns – they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. those things in there” – he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.

Chris Wooding

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

Samuel R. Delany

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

Anne Fadiman

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

Neil Gaiman

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K Le Guin

I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.

Victoria Schwab

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Stories Quotes - Page 19

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