Stories Quotes

Haruki Murakami

That’s how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Joy Fielding

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

Terry Pratchett

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.. Terry Pratchett
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

Gilda Radner

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.

Maya Angelou

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.. Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Virginia Woolf

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people..
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Tim O'Brien

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Muriel Rukeyser

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

William Golding

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

Vera Nazarian

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Joss Whedon

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

Diane Setterfield

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Octavia E. Butler

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

Umberto Eco

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

Bertolt Brecht

People who understand everything get no stories.

Willa Cather

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

C.K. Webb

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.

Bhavya Kaushik

I don't write stories, I write characters.

Angelica Banks

...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.

Cameron Conaway

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

C.K. Webb

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!

Dorothy Allison

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Charles Nodier

If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.

Mike Bryan

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

Sally Odgers

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.

Mary O'Hara

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.

Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I love words.  I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail.  I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum.  I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over.   In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

Ryan Lilly

A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.

Don Roff

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

Nina Sankovitch

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

Mary Papas

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

Nirav Sanchaniya

A Writer is Actor, Creator, Director & Producer Of HIS Life. Ask ME anything.

Alessandra Torre

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.

Clark Zlotchew

Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.

Dennis Covington

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

Sara Sheridan

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

Sara Sheridan

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

Slash Coleman

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his
Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

Slash Coleman

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.. Slash Coleman
Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

Slash Coleman

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

John Geddes

...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 ...

Vera Nazarian

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

Isaiah J. Lawrence

Sweep my dreams not beneath my feet. Be somewhere that my steps won't meet. Breaking the broom isn't a must. Don't mistake unmoved dreams for dust

Aisha Mirza

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

Felicia Johnson

Speak up and speak clearly. I want to hear what you have to say because it matters. Let's listen to each other and respect one another's opinions. Although, they may be different, wisdom allows us to be responsible for our own feelings and actions.

Richelle E. Goodrich

We forget that the sweetest joys are found in the simplest acts: hugs, laughter, quiet observation, basic movements, holding hands, pleasant music, shared stories, a listening ear, an unhurried visit, and selfless service. It is sad we forget a truth so elementary.

Sara Sheridan

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Charles De Lint

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?

Mark Cantrell

We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.

Michael Hogan

Most stories are not about people
but about life, an addiction like the rest of them
that destroys you even as you love it,
but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

Sara Sheridan

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

Arundhati Roy

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Tim O'Brien

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Ander Monson

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

Mohsin Hamid

I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Chandan Sharma

We create words, words create wonders.

Margaret Atwood

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.. Margaret
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

Arzum Uzun

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

Kelly Barnhill

There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.

Linda Sue Park

How could an alphabet - letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves - be important?
But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper.
It was all about words.
If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.

James Webb Young

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

Markus Zusak

I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...

Adam Gopnik

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.

Joan Holub

Letter make words. Words make stories. And stories can be changed with strong enough magic.

Terry Pratchett

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything.
But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories.
And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I bleed words.
I dream in narrative.
I live in infinite worlds.
I befriend figmental characters.
I wish on stars in other galaxies.
I harvest stories from a brooding muse.
I bloom under moonlight in hushed seclusion.
I am a writer.

André Alexis

so little of what anything means comes through words.

Aniruddha Sastikar

Every individual is an author in himself. It is only that he falls short of words to express; list of stories.

Hélène Cixous

And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.
And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.

Diane Setterfield

When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

Slash Coleman

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Yann Martel

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?

Terry Pratchett

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

Madeleine L'Engle

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

Marian Keyes

What doesn't kill us makes us funnier.

Christopher Moore

By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.

Neil Gaiman

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Charles De Lint

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

Jess Walter

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

John Verdon

The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.

Marisha Pessl

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

Orson Scott Card

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it
When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

James Robertson

Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.

Louise Penny

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.

Daniel Alarcón

Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking-only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.

Helen Humphreys

There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

Rachel Naomi Remen

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

Unknown Author

My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.

Haruki Murakami

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Neil Gaiman

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Neil Gaiman

All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Helen Humphreys

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Hlbalcomb

We mature not by years, but by stories…" Cinderella In Focus:Cindy's Secret

C.K. Webb

Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door...I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!!

Liz Lochhead

No one could say the stories were useless
for as the tongue clacked
five or forty fingers stitched
corn was grated from the husk
pathwork was pieced
or the darning was done...

(from 'The Storyteller Poems')

A.E. Housman

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."

(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)

Simon Van Booy

...I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We testify of what we have experienced and witnessed. May our testimony inspired others to share their story.

Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

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