Stories Quotes

You have to be careful what you write and not allow self righteousness to cloud your ability to be objective. This story is not about you, it's about people and things that no one else sees. The truth will at times come to you in a blur, unclear, unsettling refusing to leave until you figure out its relevance.

~ Crystal Evans

Stories which have failed either to become popular folk lore or to be embalmed in old newspaper files are in great danger of oblivion. If they are saved, often it is by the merest chance. And that chance may well depend upon one individual with a treasure-story bent and a retentive memory.

~ Ruby Elhult

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

~ Neil Gaiman

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.

~ Niall Williams

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

~ Steven Erikson

A king is a king, but a bard is the heart and soul of the people; he is their life in song, and the lamp which guides their steps along the paths of destiny. A bard is the essential spirit of the clan; he is the linking ring, the golden cord which unites the manifold ages of the clan, binding all that is past with all that is yet to come.

~ Stephen R. Lawhead

Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

~ Josh Rose

The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

~ Steven Millhauser

How complex, untrustworthy, and important our stories are. We will never tell you the true story of our lives.

~ Andy Quan

Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.

~ Yvette Christiansë

...stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also theonly way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

~ John Green

I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.

~ Ibraheem Hamdi

I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

~ Karen Hines

All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

~ Brandon Sanderson

I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.

~ Andrew Smith

We're all stories in the end.

~ The Doctor

Yes, life is hard,” whispers Erika, “but knowing about other people, other civilisations, other ways of living, other places – that’s your escape route, a magical journey. Once you know about these things, no matter what happens, your mind can create stories to take you anywhere you want to go.

~ Eliza Granville

The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation

~ Mikhail Lermontov

I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm a book girl--I love all the stories the world has to offer. No matter the book, I will taste it and drink it down.

~ Mizuki Nomura

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

~ Sara Sheridan

I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.

~ Sara Sheridan

Think about how much of your Bible, Old and New Testaments, is in the form not of doctrinal statements but of stories. Statements declare doctrinal truth; stories illustrate doctrinal truth. Doctrinal statements are like skeletons - bare bones, but absolutely essential to give form and order and interconnection to the body of revealed truth. Stories flesh out that skeleton, incarnate that truth, demonstrate how the doctrine looks and moves and acts in the real world of flesh and blood.

~ Layton Talbert

As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom.

~ Nicholas Trandahl

Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

~ Patrick Ness

I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.

~ Sara Sheridan

I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you.

~ Kelly J. Cogswell

Winter is the time for stories, staying fast by the glow of fire. And outside, in the darkness, the stars are brighter than you can possibly imagine.

~ Isabel Greenberg

Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.

~ Isabel Greenberg

I picked up a snake once. In Italy.Why did you do that?For a bet.Was it poisonous?We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.Did it bite you?Of course.Why of course?It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?

~ Hilary Mantel

Tell the story you want to tell, and let it be as long as it needs to be. Worry about marketing it later.

~ Patricia C. Wrede

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness… The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.

~ Philip Pullman

…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat. Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me. But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

~ David Mitchell

Henry flopped onto his bed, and his steam leaked slowly out. He began telling himself a story in his head. It was about how just and kind and understanding he was. It was about right he had been, how necessary his tone and word choice. It was about a girl who just didn't understand, who was completely ignorant. Then, for some reason, the narrator of the story included an incident in which Henry ha pushed an envelope into a strange place just to see what would happen. It hadn't even been an accident. The incident did not fit with the rest of the story, so Henry tried to ignored it. He couldn't ignore it, so he tried to explain it. Completely different things. The post office was obviously not dangerous. It was yellow. I just wanted to see what the mailman would do. The flashlight was stupid. I didn't shine a flashlight into the post office. She didn't even act sorry. I would have acted sorry. I always act sorry when people get upset. She didn't even care that I probably saved her life. She didn't know. She was unconscious. Oh, shut up.

~ N.d. Wilson

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values.

~ Jeroninio Almeida

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

ANYTHING IN THIS UNIVERSE CAN BE A STORY WORTH TELLING, AS LONG AS YOU KNOW HOW TO BEST TELL IT.

~ Film Crit Hulk!

The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste......It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.

~ Jeffrey Panzer