Stories Quotes

I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.

~ Hugh B. Cave

At seventy-one you can't expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.

~ Miroslav Penkov

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.

~ Jonathan Gottschall

I want the real story, the one that won’t make it into the history books or the scientific journals.”“And you think I’m the man to tell it, do you?”“If you were actually there, you are most definitely the person to tell it. You’re absolutely right. There have been plenty of stories. The trouble is, every account is different. Most of them are second or third hand. I don’t know . . . I guess I figured, maybe since you weren’t in such a rush to tell your version, it might be the closest to the truth.”Garvey chuckled heartily. “Well, I can’t argue with that logic, son. Despite my choice of reading materials . . .” he nodded towards the adventure novel he’d set down, a recent translation of the French novel by Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, “I’ve never been one for unnecessary embellishment. You want the God’s honest truth? In this particular case, there’s no need. It’s a hell of a goddamn story.” I was already flipping open a notebook and licking the tip of a sharpened pencil to take notes. I may have been salivating.

~ Wynne Mclaughlin

I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.

~ Neil Gaiman

It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of accuracy.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

~ S.a. Tawks

Stories are just lies made to look like truth.

~ Johnny Rich

The shadow of a character is defined by its maker...while a heroine is personified by its actions and relatability. So writers can create a world with a heroine that has impact and finish with everessence lights at the dims of its shadows

~ Raquelle Stepney

Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that can be the same for stories. It's just a matter of segregating comparisons between the senseless and the thoughtful. The norm and the unbiased. We are what we are. As are stories.

~ Corey Dale-Gardener

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

~ Amy Engel

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

~ Catherine Lacey

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Michael Hogan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

~ Sara Sheridan

Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another.

~ Dean F. Wilson

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

~ Oliver Sacks

While the stories are fiction, the journey is real.

~ C.j. Peterson

A story has to break your heart or it's not worth telling.

~ Marty Rubin

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

~ Michel Butor

Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

~ Jonathan Gottschall

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Without stories, we’d have even more trouble recognizing what’s real.

~ Amy Neftzger

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.

~ Arundhati Roy

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.

~ Tim O'brien

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

~ Jasper Fforde

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.

~ Terri Windling

Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century — particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers’ patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re–discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Günderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few.

~ Terri Windling

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.

~ Sara Sheridan

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

~ Rob Brezsny

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

~ Northrop Frye

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.

~ Northrop Frye

Learning is essential for living the life you love.

~ A.d. Posey

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

~ Sara Sheridan

If ever you feel lost, terrified, alone, emotionally and physically drained...when you feel like depression has overpowered you, and that the world itself, has devoured you...just remember that you are not alone, you are loved, you are a beautiful story waiting to be told.” -Nina Jean Slack, Once Lost, Forever Found (Vol. #1)

~ Nina Jean Slack

I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I don not claim exclusivity. Have it Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.

~ Dave Eggers

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

~ Slash Coleman

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

~ Slash Coleman

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

~ Slash Coleman