Stories Quotes
Most popular stories quotes
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
If you tell a good story, its narration will remind hearers of a bad one.
The story — from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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.
Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Storytelling is the oldest form of education.
Writing a poem is like a short love affair, writing a short story like a long love affair, writing a novel like a marriage.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
From the beginning of the human race stories have been used—by priests, by bards, by medicine men—as magic instruments of healing, of teaching.
Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.
My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bit. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
If you're a writer, a real writer, you're a descendant of those medieval storytellers who used to go into the square of a town and spread a little mat on the ground and sit on it and beat on a bowl and say, "If you give me a copper coin I will tell you a golden tale."
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The divine art is the story.
If loneliness is the disease, then the story is the cure.
A lie hides the truth, a story tries to find it.
The storyteller is a pale metaphor, I have often thought, for God who creates our world and us, falls in love with his creatures, even obsesses over us because we don't act right, and always reserves the right to say the final word.
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
The honest nonfiction storyteller is a restrained illusionist.
The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding.
We are story animals.
A story is not like a road to follow, I said, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.
I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.
It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you.
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.
Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time lasts forever.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.
A good storyteller is the conscience-keeper of a nation.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together in a dark room.
Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told.
The inner spaces that a good short story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
It's not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
When you're writing stories, you take pieces of reality and pieces of imagination and you put them all in a container like a kaleidoscope and you shake them up, and then you turn the bottom the way you do in a kaleidoscope until its the pattern that you want.
Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience. There are lessons along the way.
The bearers of stories are very welcome.
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
