Stories Quotes - Page 2

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

Mary Butts

I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.

Jerry N. Uelsmann

You have a long history," he said, when Lanya indicated her story was finished. "Ah, Harrier, were I to tell you a long story, we should be here for a sennight, perhaps more. Long stories are best saved for deep winter, when the days are short and time grows heavy." Lanya glanced at the sky.

Mercedes Lackey

You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.

Martine Leavitt

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

Erin Morgenstern

...not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.

Jacqueline Carey

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

Ursula K Le Guin

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

Mike Carey

I must have been chosen because I know it all from beginning to end. I am certainly not the story itself. I am only the grass that tattles on the wind.

Alfredo Véa

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

Khaled Hosseini

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

Daniel Taylor

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.

Chris Cleave

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

Daniel Taylor

A book is simply a snap shot of the full story.

Erica Goros

All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.

Ramsey Isler

The stories, though, they were all mine.

Wendy Jean

What are stories for if we don't learn from them?

Cornelia Funke

We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.

Kamila Shamsie

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?

Charles de Lint

No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.

George R.R. Martin

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

Ciaran Carson

Most stories are based on something real.

Paula Weston

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis...In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch.Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.

Rebecca Solnit

There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.

Jeanette Winterson

Why do bad things happen to good people?''Because it makes a good story.

Andrew Kaufman

In between bites of banana, Mr. Remora would tell stories, and the children would write the stories down in notebooks, and every so often there would be a test. The stories were very short, and there were a whole lot of them on every conceivable subject. "One day I went to the store to purchase a carton of milk," Mr. Remora would say, chewing on a banana. "When I got home, I poured the milk into a glass and drank it. Then I watched television. The end." Or: "One afternoon a man named Edward got into a green truck and drove to a farm. The farm had geese and cows. The end." Mr. Ramora would tell story after story, and eat banana after banana, and it would get more and more difficult for Violet to pay attention.

Lemony Snicket

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

Rebecca Solnit

I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.

Simon Van Booy

So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

Neil Gaiman

Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.

Andrew Kaufman

When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.

Alan Jacobs

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

Jodi Picoult

If folks don't like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories

Ann Haywood Leal

A closed book will lie there like a dead horse. But an open book will kick, buck, and bolt through perceived adventures like a wild and free stallion. So hold on.

Richelle E. Goodrich

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

Salman Rushdie

And yet, wasn't the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears?

Adam Langer

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.

Sergio Troncoso

We all tell stories--to ourselves and to each other. Some of learn to tell only the most interesting bits.

Shannon Donnelly

And so he set about restoring them, using the tricks he had learned over the years. He went to them, speaking to each of them in tones so low that none of the others could hear, getting their names, gently touching them, asking about their pains, their fears, gently eliciting their stories, reminding them of why they had run in the first place.

David Bradley

The story you live is the ripple you leave.

Michele Jennae

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.

Amit Kalantri

Every small business has to become a publisher—a publisher of marketing messages and customer resources, and a publisher of stories.

Jim Blasingame

A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading towardone inevitable conclusion

E.J. Patten

One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story’s wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.

Neale Osborne

A goodtrap, like a good story, has to arise naturally from the environment.It has to be seamless. If the prey suspects what’s coming,they’ll bolt.

E.J. Patten

I prefer a story to a prayer.

Hannah Kent

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

Julian Barnes

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

Neil Gaiman

Some stories end in despair, some begin there

Marty Rubin

There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words...

Lindsay Eland

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

Richard Kearney

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

Mary Papas

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

David Mitchell

We are all joined in a circle of stories.

Linda Joy Myers

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.

James Rozoff

Stories are like DNA, they shape the culture that they’re a part of. A society is not a society without its own unique stories. But we allow machines to make our stories, nowadays, or at least to tell them. We allow things to shape our understanding of who we are. We are entertained, not nurtured. We are given Twinkies for our mind, things that amuse but do not enlighten. It tickles our taste buds, but it does not enrich us.

James Rozoff

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

Richelle E. Goodrich

...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.

Félix J. Palma

Not everything is a love story.

Ale Meza-Santiago

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

Mary Papas

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Stories Quotes - Page 2

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