Stories Quotes

I could feel the beginning of the story gathering in her throat. Stories are that way, like storms. If you pay attention, you can sense them in the air.

~ Kay Honeyman

Pick any time of the day or night and somewhere, everywhere, stories are being told. They overlap and flow across one another, the pull away again just as waves do upon a shore. It is this knack that stories have of rubbing up against one another that makes the world an interesting place, a place of greater possibility than it would be if we told our tales alone.This is impossible, of course. Make no mistake, everyone's stories touches someone else's. And every brush of one life tale upon another, be it ever so gentle, creates something new: a pathway that wasn't there before. The possibility to create a new tale.

~ Cameron Dokey

It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.It's all down to girls, one way or another.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.

~ Criss Jami

Stories can save us.

~ Tim O'brien

All stories are the sin of their weaver.

~ Miyuki Miyabe

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

~ Tim O'brien

Is it true that some stories only just manage to be born? Or do these stories always seek their own path into the world and do they always, eventually, find a way of being told?

~ Benny Lindelauf

Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

From an author's point of view, the most painful and dangerous weapon ain't no gun or blade, but a piece of paper with the word rejected on it.

~ Anonymous

The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.

~ Umberto Eco

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

~ Tim O'brien

They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:Ma'am... or, Kind gentleman... have you a little story to tell us, please?And it seldom happened that they did not have one given them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the korrigans dance by moonlight on the heather.

~ Gaston Leroux

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.

~ Justin Cronin

The greatest thing ever in the history of the world and of all of human endeavor from time immemorial is stories.

~ Rainn Wilson

Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

The vast majority of you are going to close this tab without, even for a single moment, entertaining the thought of writing something. Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Learning the fine rationalist art of CoZE (comfort zone expansion) is a really important life skill, and putting your writing online is a low-risk way to do that. Don't try to cop out with I don't have any stories. Baloney. Everyone has stories; write up a memory that's important to you. And don't even try to tell me, Oh, but I don't know how to write! Neither did I when I started; I learned by doing. So please, set the excuses aside, put something up on the web, and share it with the rest of us. When you do, drop me a PM; I'll leave you your first review, but you have to publish something first. Well? What are you waiting for? Seriously. Go write one sentence of a new story, write now.

~ David K. Storrs

Tell me a legend,” he said out of nowhere, and he realised they were making stories of each other, or themselves.

~ Matthew Salesses

When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories.

~ Neil Gaiman

The tales are only as dark as the teller.

~ Michael R. Fletcher

Stories can start revolutions.

~ Katherine Rundell

It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.

~ Katherine Rundell

The problems of the past.How the problems of the past, uncorrected, inevitably became the problems of the future.

~ Erika Johansen

Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

PERCIVAL: Now, who is telling the story?SEVERIN: The camera is telling the story. It's watching everything, and you can't lie to it, or it will know.PERCIVAL: My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye.... Which of [the characters] is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?SEVERIN: They are all telling the story to me.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it's the other way around: one beginning and a whole Easter basket of endings.Papa, don't be silly... A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That's the whole point. That's how it is in real life.But that's not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realize that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.

~ Azar Nafisi

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.

~ Robertson Davies

It’s hard to find good stories now.

~ Seth Dickinson

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.Fire Up Your Writing Brain

~ Susan Reynolds

I love books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.

~ Tim O'brien

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is a writer, some are written in the books and some are confined to hearts.

~ Savi Sharma

Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting.

~ Pawan Mishra

I've thought and thought, but there's no other way to give you the truth except to hide it in a story and let you find your own way inside. All stories contain a truth if you look hard enough - but it might not be a good truth.

~ Kirsty Logan

What we need now are new stories to share with each other, new tales to live into the world, which is to say, stories to make real by living our own versions of them.

~ Bill Plotkin

Babies do not want to hear about babies, they like to be told of giants and castles.

~ Samuel Johnson

When you meet a dark angel don't you ever for one minute believe they are bad because they have faced the worst demons and lived to guide you through yours. It really isn't an easy job they have been asked to do, but then neither was standing on the front line during the war in heaven.

~ Shannon L. Alder