Stories Quotes

A trap, like a goodstory, needs to hint at greater things without revealing themuntil the prey is snared.

~ E.j. Patten

Being the reader of a dark fairy tale is much like being the hero of one. Our lives are filled with pain, boredom, and fear. We want to venture into the dark wood, to see the oddities and the beauties it holds, and to test ourselves against them. So we pick up a book of fairy tales. The real ones. THe weird ones. The dark ones. We see oddities and beauties galore. We test our courage and our understanding. Finally, we put the book down and return to our lives. And hopefully, just like the hero of the fairy tale, we return stronger, richer, and wiser. In difficult times - of recession and violence and political bitterness - we long for a dark forest to which we can escape; and from which we can return, better than we were before.

~ Adam Gidwitz

I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.

~ Alice Hoffman

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~ Neil Gaiman

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.

~ Amit Kalantri

Every small business has to become a publisher—a publisher of marketing messages and customer resources, and a publisher of stories.

~ Jim Blasingame

A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading towardone inevitable conclusion

~ E.j. Patten

One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story’s wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.

~ Neale Osborne

A goodtrap, like a good story, has to arise naturally from the environment.It has to be seamless. If the prey suspects what’s coming,they’ll bolt.

~ E.j. Patten

I prefer a story to a prayer.

~ Hannah Kent

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

~ Julian Barnes

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

~ Neil Gaiman

Some stories end in despair, some begin there

~ Marty Rubin

There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words...

~ Lindsay Eland

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

~ Richard Kearney

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

~ Mary Papas

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

~ David Mitchell

We are all joined in a circle of stories.

~ Linda Joy Myers

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.

~ James Rozoff

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.

~ Félix J. Palma

Not everything is a love story.

~ Ale Meza-Santiago

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

~ Mary Papas

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

~ Ciaran Carson

Most stories are based on something real.

~ Paula Weston

There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Why do bad things happen to good people?''Because it makes a good story.

~ Andrew Kaufman

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

~ Rebecca Solnit

I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.

~ Simon Van Booy

Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.

~ Andrew Kaufman

When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.

~ Alan Jacobs

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

~ Jodi Picoult

If folks don't like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories

~ Ann Haywood Leal

A closed book will lie there like a dead horse. But an open book will kick, buck, and bolt through perceived adventures like a wild and free stallion. So hold on.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

~ Salman Rushdie

And yet, wasn't the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears?

~ Adam Langer

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.

~ Sergio Troncoso

And so he set about restoring them, using the tricks he had learned over the years. He went to them, speaking to each of them in tones so low that none of the others could hear, getting their names, gently touching them, asking about their pains, their fears, gently eliciting their stories, reminding them of why they had run in the first place.

~ David Bradley

The story you live is the ripple you leave.

~ Michele Jennae

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

~ Mary Butts