c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
This is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a lie right from the start!
— Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 1
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?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
Think of all the stories you've heard, Bast. You have a young boy, the hero. His parents are killed he sets out for vengeance. What next?"Bast hesitated, his expression puzzled. Chronicler answered the question instead. "He finds help. A clever talking squirrel. An old drunken swordsman. A mad hermit in the woods. That sort of thing."Kvothe nodded. "Exactly! He finds the mad hermit in the woods, proves himself worthy, and learns the names of all things, just like Taborlin the Great. Then with these powerful magics at his beck and call, what does he do?"Chronicler shrugged. "He finds the villains and kills them." "Of course," Kvothe said grandly. "Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
I don't have much time for stories," Vin said."Seems that fewer and fewer people do, these days." A canopy kept off the ash, but he seemed unconcerned about the mists. "It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all such a fetish for it. It's not a very nice place these days.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages
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)
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
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....
— Paul     Murray, Skippy Dies
Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
— Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
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.
— Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
The Story of the Woman with Three Brothers"A woman once had three brothers. They all had wives, but she was not married. Though she was virtuous and hardworking, her brothers would not offer a dowry. How unhappy she was! What could she do?She's so miserable, she goes to the garden and hangs herself from a tree.The eldest brother walks through the garden and pretends not to see her. The second brother walks through the garden and pretends not to see that she's dead. The third brother sees her, bursts into tears, and takes her body inside.A woman once had three brothers. When she died, no one wanted to care for her body. Though she had been virtuous and hardworking, her brothers would not serve her. How cruel this was! What would happen?She is ignored in death as in life, until her body begins to stink.The eldest brother gives one piece of cloth to cover her body. The second brother gives two pieces of cloth. The third brother wraps her in as many clothes as possible so she'll be warm in the afterworld.A woman once had three brothers. Now dressed for her future as a spirit, her brothers won't spend any money on a coffin. Though she was virtuous and hardworking, her brothers are stingy. How unfair this was! Would she ever find rest?All alone, all alone, she plans her haunting days.The eldest brother says, "We don't need to bury her in a box. She is fine the way she is." The second brother says, "We could use that old box in the shed." The third brother says, "This is all the money I have. I will go and buy her a coffin."A woman once had three brothers. They have come so far, but what will happen to Sister now? Elder brother- mean in spirit; Second brother- cold in heart; but in Third brother love may come through.Elder brother says, "Let's bury her here by the water buffalo road." (meaning she would be trampled for all eternity) Second brother says, "Let's bury her here under the bridge." (meaning she would wash away) But third brother - good in heart, filial in all ways - says, "We will bury her behind the house so everyone will remember her.
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.
— Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back
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)
— Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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. All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes. Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.
— Lois Lowry
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
— John Berger, Once In Europa
A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.
— George Lucas
Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?
— Julianna Baggott, Pure
Then a person has only one tale?”No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.
— Chris Wooding, Poison
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
— Flannery O'Connor
I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.
— Andrew Clements, Things Hoped For
It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.
— Katherine Hannigan, Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World
I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets.In every face.
— Andrew Clements, Things Hoped For
Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.
— Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents
—  there should be nothing of the sort in it.
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...
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly."The circus arrives without warning.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. 
— Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe
By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“ Why would I do that?” Poison interjected.Bear with me,” Fleet said patiently. “If you did, then the tale would take on a whole new light. Instead of being the journey of Poison from Gull to save her sister, it would be the terrible story of how a young girl became a cold-blooded killer. They way it would be written would be different. Do you see? Or you might die right now, and it would turn out that it wasn’t your tale all along it was Bram’s or Peppercorn’s, and you were just one of the sideline characters. The whole story has to be known before it can be recorded; otherwise it might suddenly change. That’s the beauty, Poison. You never know what’s going to happen next. When the tale is ended, then the writing will be visible to your eyes; until then it is unwritten.
— Chris Wooding, Poison
Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.
— Richard Paul Evans, A Perfect Day
But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.
— Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster
We walk until there aren't more houses, all the way to the part of the beach where the current makes the waves come in then rush back out so that the two waves clash, water casting up like a geyser. We watch that for a while and then Scottie says, "I wish Mom was here." I'm thinking the exact same thought. That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too. Every day I kept track of anecdotes, occurrences, and gossip, bullet-pointing the news in my head and even rehearsing my stories before telling them to Joanie in bed at night.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
— Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
— Ben Okri
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
— Joan Didion
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
— Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want life to be full of adventure and creativity and daring that might, just might, be real.
— Dana Frank, Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments
Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
There are stories in the air as thick as birds around me, he would say. I will save those stories from starving he would say. I have a great hunger for stories, he would say.
— Brian  Doyle, Mink River
The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale...
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.
— Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!
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?
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Four Spirits
This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk.
— Patrick Rothfuss
He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
— Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
— Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
It's one of the greatest gifts you can give someone, knowing their stories.
— Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us
Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.
— Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
a story is ready when it falls from your face
— Steve Aylett
Women.Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, aching, they came into my bed like I could fix it. And every time I would try. I would do anything a woman wanted as long as she didn't want too much of me. As long as I could hide behind her need, I could make her believe anything. I would tell her stories. I would bury in them. I have buried more women than I am willing to admit. I have told more lies than I can stand.
— Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.
— Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan
Everyone's got a different story.
— Emma Donoghue, Room
Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical.""That's just a story.""So are we- we're stories too.
— Matthew Quick, Boy21
Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if 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.
— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
— André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
— Finley Peter Dunne
I'll tell you a secret.Old storytellers never die.They disappear into their own story.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Yes", Kumiko said, seriously. "Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can't take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn't put it in story - ""And explain it -""No!" she said, suddenly sharp. "Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. The story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us." She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. "As it surely, surely would.
— Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife
Not all events are stories.
— Scarlett Thomas, Going Out
I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own—hard for me, at least.
— Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch
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.
— Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child
But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice things to have; they are essential survival tools. And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important as the stories we tell other people.
— Hugh MacLeod, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination
According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.
— Jincy Willett, Jenny and the Jaws of Life: Short Stories
What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do. -Silenus
— Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe
All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)
— George Michael Sinclair Kennedy
A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.""You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.""And if it was?""In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.""In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.""You do not find this rather narrow?""Madam—""Well?""I was quoting you.
— Steven Brust, Sethra Lavode
People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.
— Scarlett Thomas, Going Out
The more bleach in the bedsheets, the greater Chastity's impulse to roll around in them. A party would be thrown, she decided, the kind that would tell a small story in the contents of the dustpan the next morning. Detached sequins and mint leaves muddled by high heels, shrimp tales mixed in with a few shards of broken glass, a crust of bread. She rolled in her bleached sheets until they wrapped around her like a storm, and she fell asleep in the eye of it.
— Amelia Gray, AM/PM
But we also need stories. Great stories.
— John Piper, A Sweet and Bitter Providence: Sex, Race, and the Sovereignty of God
They are not my stories...they are merely mine to tell
— Jeremy Aldana
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. 
— Vladimir Nabokov
There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin.
— Sarah Hall, Haweswater
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
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.
— Philip Pullman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.
— Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
— William Deresiewicz
We come together as a community — in our sitting room, in sacred space or in a coffee shop. We share our joy and pain, our surprises and disappointments, successes and failures and we try to make some sense of it all. We listen to find some way to connect. We give reassurance or advice. Sometimes we say nothing because just being there is enough. Storytelling is that moment in time when we are not alone - I met my Soul in a Coffee Shop
— Louise Gilbert
Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.
— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
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.
— Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl
It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.
— Marion Dane Bauer, The Very Little Princess
We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.
— Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps.
— N.K. Jemisin
The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That’s when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.
— Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden
Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.
— Chris Priestley, Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth
Day 72I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me.
— Gemma Seltzer, Speak to Strangers
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.
— David James Duncan, River Teeth
Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof."A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")
— Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
...stories break silence and nourish those who work, feel, and dream.From Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion
— Carmen Naranjo
The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.
— Philippe Grimbert, Memory
But Alfanhui didn't want to abuse the rosemary, because one shouldn't tell a lot in one day, since the stories lose their strength.
— Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanui
Every story needs to be worth telling.
— Vera Nazarian
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.
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
All cat stories start with the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,' and I lay with Jonas listening to his stories.
— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.
— Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen And Her Art
They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.
— Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women
It is customary to have vampires in stories nowadays - they are quite the norm, just like wicked stepmothers used to be. Yes, vampires have sent wicked stepmothers into retirement homes, to brew cups of tea and tend to their arthritic knees.
— Jane De Suza, The Spy Who Lost Her Head
Stories choose us, not the other way around.
— Nidhie Sharma
There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
— Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976
The stories we are destined to tell find us.
— Nidhie Sharma
When you tell your story, and I listen, we both gain.
— Brent M. Jones
When a story gets wedged in your head and refuses to go away, when it keeps coming back, again and again, despite your seeming inability to tell it, know this..the story has chosen you and You are ready, so tell it or it’ll haunt you to the end of your days. Characters too! They will find you, drop anchor and before you know, they will speak through you, shaping their own narrative, their own unique destiny. Let go and allow them. You have no option but to be a channel for them. This joy of surrender can only be felt… never truly explained.
— Nidhie Sharma
The one who tells the stories rules the world.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaman
Knowing how to dream is more important than the story, because the story tells itself.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
The length of novels, poems and stories, is measured by the number of missing words; a thousand pages become one, one becomes a thousand.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
Are infinite possibilities a storyteller's worst enemy or best friend? I'd say a bit of both really and one must be grateful for this paradox.
— Nidhie Sharma
Because stories are how we share our lives and what we truly mourn when they are lost. Stories are what connect us to our past and carry us to our future. They are what we cherish and what we remember.
— Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver
I hide away in my room to seeJust what stories will come to me.
— P.B. McIlrath, Life and Strife: A Collection of Poetry
I loved those eyes , even though they never saw my pain ,I loved those ears , even though they heard my stories
— Ratish Edwards
oYu begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.
— Marty Rubin
You begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.
— Marty Rubin
I had come to believe that there was something sacred in telling stories and telling them true.
— Kirby Larson, Hattie Ever After
Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Enzo thought ends were disappointing. He said when you were really immersed in a story, you started to have expectations. And the end was never as great as you imagined it could have been. Even though I mostly agreed with him, I couldn't help wanting to know everything. I was always looking for more.
— Chelsea Sedoti, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett
That's what we all do : endlessly take the long way around.
— Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women: Stories
One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true - it actually never was true. Not now not ever. There is another form of obsolescence that can fray at the cocoon we have spun about ourselves, that is, the story was true at one time, and for an extended period; the story was even true and good to us, but now it is no longer true and no longer of any benefit, in fact our continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and we have locked the door from the inside.The imprisoning story I identified by the time the entree was served was one I had told myself for a long time. “In order to write I need peace and quiet and an undisturbed place far from others or the possibility of being disturbed. I knew however, that if I wanted to enter the next creative stage, something had to change; I simply did not have enough free space between traveling, speaking and being a good father and husband to write what I wanted to write. The key in the lock turned surprisingly easy, I simply said to myself, “What if I acted as if it wasn’t true any more, what if it had been true at one time, but now at this stage in the apprenticeship I didn’t need that kind of insulation anymore, what if I could write anywhere and at any time?” One of the interesting mercies of this kind of questioning is that it is hard to lose by asking: if the story is still true, we will soon find out and can go back to telling it. If it is not we have turned the key, worked the hinges and walked out into the clear air again with a simple swing of the door.
— David Whyte
the stories that produced [Trump] were always contested. There were always other stories, ones that insisted that money is not what’s valuable, and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the natural world… while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story
— Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us.
— Patti Callahan Henry, The Bookshop at Water's End
Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time.
— Hermann Hesse
If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.
— Anne Lamott
They say there are three kinds of people in the world: those who listen to stories, those who tell them, and those who make them.
— Claire Fayers, The Voyage to Magical North
In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
Reasons were invented, and stories were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read. Fragments were true but we needed stories greater than fragments. We needed stories in order to imagine the mad world we lived in.
— Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great
Bedtime storiesEventide RhapsodiesAnthologies of MemoryPlease enter cautiously and feel free to open what is closed
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore...
— Ana Claudia Antunes, ACross Tic
Once you tell somebody a story, you are all in the same world and you can all speak to each other about the same things and understand the same things.
— Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great
She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: "Once upon a time." An incantation.
— Jennifer McMahon, Don't Breathe a Word
A casket full of stories I presentFrom the ocean of my feelings and its moodSome bring with it a tempest of tearsSome make you sit and broodThere are a few pearls of optimism tooWhich are colourful and multi-hued!
— Neelam Saxena Chandra
It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession. In films and stories we see spectacles forming in the street and parades coming from around the corner, and we know to greet then with distrust and apprehension: their intent is still to be revealed.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is.
— Napz Cherub Pellazo
You know how it feels to think you've ruined everything. You're hoping if my story has a happy ending there's hope for yours too...
— CJ Redwine
Stories help us remember what we never want to forget.
— Emory R. Frie, Neverland
Who am I? I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable!
— Patrick Ness
There is no story that is not true," said Uchendu. "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.
— Brian Doyle
If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.
— David Vann, Bright Air Black
Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
I'm not just a reader or a writer; I inhale written words like they're my oxygen. It's not a hobby. It's a passion. People intrigue me. Life intrigues me. I see a story behind every pair of eyes I meet, history in every voice. I'll see someone wearing a smile and wonder what put it there. Words allow me to immerse myself in a whole other world. I get to become a different person.
— Nicola Haken, Broken
When I ask him if he thinks there's a moral to his story, he says he's sure there must be, but doesn't know exactly what it is. "Maybe," he says after a short pause, "it's that this world is full of lizards, and even though there's nothing we can do about it, it is always helpful to find out how big they are.
— Etgar Keret, The Seven Good Years
Storytelling still matters in the digital age, because commencing in adolescences and continuing through adulthood, people receive training in using stories to describe the human contestants, organize the facts, communicate the moral message behind the messy human conflict, evaluate competing ethical issues, and render a final value judgment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
One spring patio is for rodeosniggled with iodine figures, weavedtapestries inside vast Tuileries.But that reminds me, how exactlydo words form brittle histories
— Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade: Poems
Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.
— Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone
Any story worth telling has been embellished a little bit, Skyco, but the best stories are born from an honest seed that simply grows a little in the retelling of it.
— Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, Spirit Quest
She is a figure of legend and fairy tale, one to be taken seriously, or she might knock you off your feet with a quick whirl of the staff she carries everywhere.
— Claire Wong, The Runaway
Come with me to the mountains. Every rock there tells a story.
— Avijeet Das
Captain Reed eyed him thoughtfully. "I built my whole life around the stories they about me. You know what I learned?"Archer shook his head."What you do makes you who you are....
— Traci Chee, The Reader