Stories Quotes

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

~ Lisa Cron

When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said.

~ Michel De Certeau

My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.

~ Elizabeth Hernandez

Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.

~ Nora Raleigh Baskin

Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.

~ Habeeb Akande

People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.

~ Marjorie Pay Hinckley

In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.

~ Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

~ Graham Swift

But bad luck makes good stories.

~ Bernard Evslin

And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows.

~ Cathy Ostlere

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.

~ Stephen King

I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.

~ Herbert Rosendorfer

The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.

~ Shandy L. Kurth

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.

~ Donald Miller

...the making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer...

~ John Geddes

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

~ William Kittredge

All Stories are True.

~ John Edgar Wideman

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

~ Dennis Covington

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

~ Margaret Thatcher

This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

~ Emma Donoghue

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

~ Erin Morgenstern

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

~ Ben Okri

We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply...

~ Neil Gaiman

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.

~ Roberto Bolaño

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

~ Theodora Goss

I have always been drawn to coming-of-age stories and books and movies featuring compelling young characters.

~ Emily Giffin

Some stories are true that never happened.

~ Elie Wiesel

A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.

~ Elizabeth Edwards

I did Internet dating for a while, and that is rife with horrible dating stories.

~ Allison Tolman

I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.

~ Richard Lagravenese

I write a lot of environmental stories.

~ Peter Heller