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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
6b14df1 There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. 1970 writing inspirational stories Maya Angelou
fabad96 It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a . happiness stories Haruki Murakami
7c40127 Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. mind youth life stories Neil Gaiman
10d80c5 But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin. stories Mitch Albom
982b4df Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. story reading fiction books read stories Hilary Mantel
efc5f46 When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. story reading stories John Berger
e192140 We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. stories Margaret Atwood
f510f19 A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart. stories Chuck Palahniuk
e2f434b I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair. reading stories Sarah J. Maas
a4e7c1c You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you. life page-257 john-green turtles-all-the-way-down stories John Green
bac94e8 Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light. story light darkness stories Kate DiCamillo
f76ea21 My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind. heritage storytelling stories Tahir Shah
9f49591 We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write. writing write readers stories Neil Gaiman
c0a9cf3 A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. fiction writing on-fiction stories Diane Setterfield
bc32738 That's how stories happen -- with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. unhappiness life misfortune stories Haruki Murakami
9cc3baf There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. women africa pilot stories Beryl Markham
70788dc Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. truth stories Albert Camus
640a893 Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory. persistence hurts stephen-king novels requirements talent misery remember scars writers memory stories Stephen King
7c45f29 Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both. heroes loras-tyrell jaime-lannister villains knights legend memory stories George R.R. Martin
fec64bd A story is not like a road to follow ... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. discovery writing exploration creative-process stories Alice Munro
205f4ad The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. story reading reader stories Ursula K. Le Guin
eb1c2ec There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world. story world sunrise stories Terry Pratchett
a3ebbcc Stories are a different kind of true. stories Emma Donoghue
4a40c4f "October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content." endings happy-endings stories Neil Gaiman
8197a0f In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. light write read stories Alberto Manguel
65bcc40 The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. humanity chimpanzees stories Terry Pratchett
9bb3040 I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. on-writing storytelling stories Stephen King
7775599 What doesn't kill us makes us funnier. paraphrased stories Marian Keyes
2da58c0 The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. stars meaning stories Rebecca Solnit
8b39d7d Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he, Dad?' 'Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that's saying a lot.' Frodo: [continue walking] You've left out one of the chief characters - Samwise the Brave. I want to hear more about Sam. [stops and turns to Sam] Frodo: Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam. Sam: Now Mr. Frodo, you shouldn't make fun; I was being serious. Frodo: So was I. [they continue to walk] Sam: Samwise the Brave... samwise-the-brave samwise sam-gamgee lord-of-the-rings stories J.R.R. Tolkien
f3a60fd Stories are like children. They grow in their own way. growing stories Madeleine L'Engle
9bf7d37 She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death. humorous stories Neil Gaiman
50487ec All stories are true. But some of them never happened. perspective stories James A. Owen
f4005ca Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories. stories Diane Setterfield
6e89ea2 Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. life stories Jeanette Winterson
30a5d3b You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story. stories Marian Keyes
e5a4be5 Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. story reading books stories Anne Fadiman
052ba41 Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she'd dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they'd lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings--as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you'd never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself. reading stories Cornelia Funke
3050ca6 Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story. stories Neil Gaiman
611a834 Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right? magic faith fairies stories Neil Gaiman
292c5ab Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliche and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. stories Marisha Pessl
4122a65 "I am Tessa Gray," she said in a low, clear voice. "And I believe in the importance of stories." tessa-gray stories Cassandra Clare
05f35fa By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth. story stories Christopher Moore
1ce90f1 Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life. meaning stories Milan Kundera
75066b4 Everyone's got a different story. peoples stories Emma Donoghue
b5f038c All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is ; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: stories Jess Walter
a966473 All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful. writing on-writing storytelling stories Umberto Eco
fcc66a2 She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn't taste bad, but she was still unhappy. stories Cornelia Funke
1eb5b77 ...the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe. narrative-causality stories Terry Pratchett
98119c2 "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." innocence stories Emma Donoghue
0d74eac History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot. stories Paul Murray
47c335a I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? glory home stories Ursula K. Le Guin
6dc6394 If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. storytelling stories John Berger
6c1f740 "We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers. And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own. If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us. We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special. We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread. We have friends who lend us their favorite books. Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears. stories Lois Lowry
8ecc2a2 Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos. story personality identity cosmos chaos stories Madeleine L'Engle
30807b5 This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237) stories Elizabeth Gilbert
69f66b1 Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you. inspirational grieving stories George R.R. Martin
91f236c Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word.... stories Paul Murray
46bc524 All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. writing stories Margaret Atwood
86e3cd4 Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. stories Tim O'Brien
cf4ae74 That's why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too - their dreams and their scars and their stories. people dreams involved scars stories Tom Perrotta
fc52d0f Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent. fiction narrative storytelling stories Oliver Sacks
6ec8433 For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him. human-nature stories Emma Donoghue
1fc4089 But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats. rats stories Terry Pratchett
af9c776 "Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story." transformation folk-tales hans-christian-andersen swans the-wild-swans stories Rebecca Solnit
c4efcec I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down. Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more. That's when the stories show up in me. They find me all the time. They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent. The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first. Maybe they all just merge into one. We'll see, I guess. I'll let you know when I decide. wonder fighters written underdogs real-world streets hunger desire stories Markus Zusak
b25fa60 Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. stories Terry Pratchett
bfc06f4 Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. stories Salman Rushdie
79c6b0f All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories--if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death. stories Neil Gaiman
1be41b9 My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom. wisdom stories Anonymous
8588424 But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies. lies the-truth stories Orson Scott Card
9c86d6a "Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End." fairytales stories Salman Rushdie
0ea6992 n 'Glb lns qd `shw Hdthan wHdan `l~ l'ql khll Hythm y`d Hdthan frydan Hqan, wySlH tmman lSyGth fy qS@ qSyr@. stories Jeffrey Archer
4a840e5 There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue. time writing meaning feeling journals stories Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2bb7d18 Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth. lying lies honesty truth lie stories Marisha Pessl
851f4ef Finally, I'd say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don't be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I'm at work I'm highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what's more, they're completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, 'Of course, and this is the way my imagination works. folktales tales folklore stories Philip Pullman
0c23343 When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed. truth stories Orson Scott Card
96b4b47 From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story. libraries reading stories Alberto Manguel
9566ce3 Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds. stories Neil Gaiman
95d1ab5 Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. jesus god truth buddha joseph-campbell masks-of-god scheherazade storytellers the-brothers-grimm children stories Melanie Tem
31e5d28 Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as seperate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming. True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction -don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. (p.87) stories Jeanette Winterson
92e34c6 Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. prose stories John Berger
c00c956 To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories. seasons words stories Terry Pratchett
0df7589 My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought. Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind. wisdom in-arabian-nights sufis sufism knowledge stories Tahir Shah
9ad274d old stories are like old friends (...) you have to visit them from time to time. friends visiting home stories George R.R. Martin
93d3e29 What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. writing stories Tim O'Brien
71d9bba 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. empathy-psychology narratology narrative stories Julian Barnes
8096761 Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. travel serendipity travel-writing stories Paul Theroux
8d6cc05 We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for. That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out? windows houses small wolves dangerous stories Markus Zusak
a2d6c4b n lklmt mthl l`Sfyr , tmDy Tlyq@ dwn nZm wl w`y wbmkn 'y kn bqlyl mn lsHr 'n yHbsh lytjr bh words stories Isabel Allende
5236f10 I'm sorry to burden you,' she said. She felt like a crybaby. 'What can we do with our stories,' he said, 'but tell them? life stories Sena Jeter Naslund
a78889e ...what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning. light waves stories Jeanette Winterson
bf61ade If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? parables morals stories Thomas Hardy
3cc80cf ...not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. storytelling stories Jacqueline Carey
b63cd23 I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us. stories Charles de Lint
53e24e4 I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's? world people stories Charles de Lint
f490eb0 "No," said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time." stories George R.R. Martin
e7a2a2a People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them. truth strange memory stories Alan Moore
9f93b50 It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along. history stories Ishmael Beah
d5d83a6 Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. darkness folklore stories Margaret Atwood
8104333 Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him. stories Ursula K. Le Guin
116fadf Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure. grief humour stories Colson Whitehead
c8dca5e I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster. literature women writing life pakistani saadat-hasan-manto pakistan taboo stories Mohsin Hamid
191e551 For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. world life stories Cormac McCarthy
e070b1b "I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. ("80 Books No Woman Should Read")" books stories Rebecca Solnit
a3de40e Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page reading life stories Cornelia Funke
276e0d6 Stories are light. stories Kate DiCamillo
41ecd05 n lfrq lwHyd byn lsyd lnbyl w byn lqrSn lHqyqy hw m` mn ytqsm kl mnhm Gny'mh thief stories Jeffrey Archer
d43d3e3 Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century -- particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers' patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re-discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Gunderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few. feminism germany fairy-tales-for-adults magical-stories stories Terri Windling
4fdf90f We're wired for story. In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there's a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we're connecting with others and being brave with our stories - it's in our biology. courage storytelling stories Brené Brown
9b92b6a "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?" -- thomas-cromwell italy snakes stories Hilary Mantel
56d63cf It's only a story.' As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the everchanging world. permanent-words stories Keith Donohue
6b162eb For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories. stories Tahir Shah
7a9c449 ...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable--the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction. family religion veganism vegetarianism mythology food stories Jonathan Safran Foer
97bc351 You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth. reading writing pop-culture pulp-fiction stories Mike Carey & Peter Gross
a4868c6 I eat stories like grapes. samuel stories John Steinbeck
9ae7251 Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us. stories Francesca Lia Block
5744c15 There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind. stories David James Duncan
11a6bdf When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. words truth stories Diane Setterfield
fda5347 If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it. writing hamlet stories Thomas C. Foster
9ae2645 Most of the stories you hear about dragons are fodder for fools. fodder fools stories George R.R. Martin
3ee163a I was imprisoned, and no-one freed me. I cried for help, and no-one freed me. Eventually, I shook off my chains and I returned. They said, 'Why do you no longer love us?' I said, 'I realized that you have always been my chains. revenge djinn mythical progression prison stories Jeff Mach
1bf41a1 "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." writing stories David Mitchell
b8b6f60 "I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with "BANG! Expand! Sssss...," then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things..." contexxt ending endings stories Iain M. Banks
ba318ec Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.) embers self play stories Samuel Beckett
7edf8a9 'n 'mwt dwn 'n ntbh stories Isabel Allende
17892b5 All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death. dreams happiness happy-ending endings stories Neil Gaiman
03a4ff7 "There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. stories Philip Pullman
bf78738 Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give. example stewardship giving encouragement stories Randy Alcorn
e18265d To turn the tide of materialism in the Christian community, we desperately need bold models of kingdom-centered living. Despite our need to do it in a way that doesn't glorify people, we must hear each other's stories about giving or else our people will not learn to give. models christianity learning modelling example stewardship giving encouragement community materialism humility kingdom stories Randy Alcorn
cf47536 lq`d@ ldhhby@ fy lsjn n Hdth wnth~ bk l'mr khlf qDbnh hy 'l ts'l 'y sjyn `m 'd~ bh l~ hnk , l dh 'thr hw lmwDw` prisoner roll stories Jeffrey Archer
89d9980 Ah--now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common as corn. Plant a field and you got corn. Plant a kingdom and you got a king. It is that simple. fairy-tales stories Jane Yolen
587e3ab - The myths are dead. The gods are dead. The ghosts and ghouls and phantoms are dead. There is only the State, and the People. - No, Monsieur Robespierre. There is much more than that. myths stories Neil Gaiman
abe96b5 "Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. "You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up." writing truth writing-advice teachers storytelling stories Betty Smith
dd61e35 History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another. stories Thomas C. Foster
e97210b Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he's just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again. writing stories Barry Lopez
5c2154c What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too. literature stories-of-people poor-people nutcracker stories Gregory Maguire
20e07eb In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away -- along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. Disney commented. feminism fairy-tales-for-adults magical-stories stories Terri Windling
fed7012 ...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. reality truth revelation stories Salman Rushdie
1efda71 Or was Chris thinking, as I was, that if we went to the police and told our story, our faces would be splashed on the front pages of every newspaper in the country? Would the glare of publicity make up for what we'd lose? Our privacy-our need to stay together? Could we lose each other just to get even? story front-page newpaper faces lose together privacy newspapers thinking police stories V.C. Andrews
9ee78e6 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. writing storytelling stories Audrey Niffenegger
429e5af Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. reading fiction life end stories Jeanette Winterson
c19cacb 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. stories David Mitchell
ee05013 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. magical-realism interpretation readers stories David Mitchell
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