Stories Quotes

They've all got stories, Jess thought. I need to know them. Best of all, he could know them. He could learn anything here. It felt like limitless possibilities.

~ Rachel Caine

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.

~ Rick Bragg

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...

~ Diane Duane

A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth.

~ Alexandra Curry

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

A story is a garden you can carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for the truth.

~ Alexandra Curry

Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.

~ Okey Ndibe

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

~ Thomas C. Foster

No two stories are the same. They may seem the same at first glance, but, once you take a closer look, give the story some of your time, you realise its unique qualities.

~ S.a. Tawks

When I was a kid, Granpa Portman's fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and to have your life made unrecognised by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be - THAT was magical.

~ Ransom Riggs

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.

~ Thomas C. Foster

I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

~ Johnny Rich

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

~ Yann Martel

On a cloudy day, when the dim dance of the firelight and the warmth of the sconces are not enough, the books shed their own form of light. By the hundreds, they fill the shelves that stretch across every inch of exposed wall. They rise up to the ceiling, warriors of an impenetrable army, encircling my over-sized armchair and keeping me safe as they whisper their stories softly in my ear.

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

Life isn’t really linear. Although it’s generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that’s ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

It’s hard to say where a story begins and ends. You have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Somewhere between perception and reality. Between what is spoken and what is heard. Between what is written and what is edited out. I know this, you can’t have an ending without a beginning. Even if they are really just random pieces of the middle that tend to stand out. Staccato notes on the page. Points on a circle.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

You’re telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland.

~ Imraan Coovadia

All stories are true, Astrea. By speaking them aloud, we bring them to life. Once words mingle with breath and sound, they become something new and alive.

~ Hilary Thompson

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.

~ Johnny Rich

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, Let your characters grow. Up. And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, Recognize you are grown up.

~ Jane Yolen

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.

~ Jane Yolen

Here, there isn't much but stories and rain. And a fella can get tired of the rain.

~ Tom King

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just don't have a happy ending.

~ Jodi Picoult

These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right. I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.

~ Elizabeth Wein

Live as if they're going to tell stories about you.

~ Shari Arnold

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

~ Guillermo Del Toro

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.

~ Theodore Sturgeon

Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives.

~ Alexia Casale

The story of the tree is written on every leaf.

~ Marty Rubin

But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.

~ David Mitchell

There are subtle truths buried in every make-believe. You never know where you might find one.

~ Shari Arnold

Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story—whether it’s happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is—depends entirely on where you start it and where you end it.

~ Judith Ryan Hendricks

A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles.

~ Caren Gussoff

The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold.

~ Lauren Beukes