c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.
— Neil Gaiman
These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war. Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.
— Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book
Supposing an emperor was persuaded to wear a new suit of clothes whose material was so fine that, to the common eye, the clothes weren't there. And suppose a little boy pointed out this fact in a loud, clear voice...Then you have The Story of the Emperor Who Had No Clothes.But if you knew a bit more, it would be The Story of the Boy Who Got a Well-Deserved Thrashing from His Dad for Being Rude to Royalty, and Was Locked Up.Or The Story of the Whole Crowd Who Were Rounded Up by the Guards and Told 'This Didn't Happen, OK? Does Anyone Want to Argue?'Or it could be a story of how a whole kingdom suddenly saw the benefit of the 'new clothes', and developed an enthusiasm for healthy sports in a lively and refreshing atmosphere which got many new adherents every year, and led to a recession caused by the collapse of the conventional clothing industry.It could even be a story about The Great Pneumonia Epidemic of '09.It all depends on how much you know.
— Terry Pratchett
The world would be a sadder place without stories.
— David Gemmell
In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.
— Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
We read about you to be with you, to walk in someone else's shoes, to experience another life. Some of those lives are hard, and others are easy, but we're with you every step of the way. We read about people in impossible situations because we're dealing with horrible things ourselves, in our lives. And you going through your story helps us with ours, no matter how yours ends.
— James Riley
History is the stories we tell about the past.
— Thomas King
There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.
— Neil Gaiman, The Doll's House
To call up modern versions of the old stories, one has to go forth and live life. As a result then, one will have the challenge of not only living the story, taking it all in, but also interpreting it in whatever ways are useful. So too, one will reap the reward of telling all about it afterward. One's interest in the world, and in having experiences, is really an interest in hearing, having, living one more story, and then one more, then one more story, till one cannot live them out loud any longer. Perhaps it should be said that the drive to live out stories is as deep in the psyche, when awakened, as it is compelling to the psyche to listen to stories and learn from them. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. in Introduction to the 2004 edition of The hero with a thousand faces (J.Campbell)
— Joseph Campbell
A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.
— Aisha Mirza
The stories we pretend do not exist, are the stories that will haunt us till the end.
— Srividya Srinivasan
Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message.
— Jonah Berger
It’s so the stories go that the Ginen tell. If you find a beautiful fairmaid swimming in the river, her fish tail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she’ll ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh …“It’s my business,” he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground.If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.
— Nalo Hopkinson
Without your stories, without your heroes and their awesome powers, how could you explain this, this here, this incomprehensible real that ever refuses to embrace any rule, any cliché besides the intransigent, pathetic truth that we all end, that no one comes back.
— Tom   King
If our story isn’t serving us, negatively impacts our families, our communities, or our organizations, we might just have to find a way to “StoryJack” the story, transforming it, and creating a new story that we resonate with so that we can “Jack Into” a better version or experience the story – and our life - in a new way.
— Lyssa Danehy deHart
I have wandered many roads that I have never traveled; touched many things that my eyes have never seen. It is through stories that life is made, and through stories that life is saved.
— James Avery Fuchs, Gasoline and Winter
I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.
— Danielle Collobert, Murder
Readers can surprise you. Many times, they notice layers in your stories, that even you were not aware of while writing.
— Shon Mehta
The next best thing to christmas is...... a story worth reading.
— Nadun Lokuliyanage
But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.
— Lauren Oliver, Rooms
Stories are light.
— Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.
— Zainab Salbi
Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.
— Cameron Dokey, The Storyteller's Daughter: A Retelling of the Arabian Nights
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.
— Jane Yolen, Black Swan, White Raven
[T]hat they may believe you, you must say it as obscurely as possible, just like that, simply in hints. You must only give them a peep of the truth, just enough to tantalize them. They'll tell a story better than ours, and of course they'll believe themselves more than they would us...
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The problem with secrets is that they don't want to stay that way. They say information wants to be free. And maybe that's the case. But what I do know is that every story wants to be told. You can bury them as deep as you want. You can hide them. You can toss them into the darkest places you can imagine, but sooner or later... They always come back.
— Justin Jordan, Deep State, Vol. 1
Stories are one of the most powerful ways in which we communicate ideas among ourselves. They are the stuff that brings us together, the things we celebrate, the things we share with one another.
— Robert Stephen Parry
There are always two sides to a story.
— Una McCormack
You are the stories you tell, whatever their basis in fact or experience. It’s who you are.
— Richard House, The Kills
Stories are how we connect. Evolution isn’t seriously about thumbs but about how we use language – that’s what raises us above dumb animals, right? Language?
— Richard House, The Kills
Telling stories to make himself into something that he isn’t. We all do it. We all tell stories to make ourselves look better.
— Richard House, The Kills
Some people believe in telling stories. Some believe in doing things about which stories will be told in times to come.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Write and your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
o	There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.
— Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.
— Don Roff
Moral stories are always imaginary , but these stories induce real moral values in a human society .
— Usama Gondal
There is no ‘what if’. Only in stories.
— Claire Robertson, The Spiral House
Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.
— Mia Couto
But here's a great thing about stories: they can be retold.
— Christine Heppermann, Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
Because maybe it's in the stories that the people we love are still alive.
— Daisy Whitney, When You Were Here
The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.
— James Plath
You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Stories were a living thing. They changed to suit the teller or the times.
— Sandra Dallas, Prayers for Sale
To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood
— Tushar Upreti, The Days Of Childhood
But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.
— Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book
She had forced herself to learn to read – picked up bits and pieces, here and there, from the very few teachers who had been patient with her; from looking at words while out and about; from television, and from friends. And to avoid the shouting and drug-induced moaning, and the row of male visitors her mum would entertain, she would barricade herself in her room – there'd been no lock – and lose herself in books.
— Dianna Hardy, Broken Lights
Wit smiled. "All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
STORIES" it should not be the perfect,not be untold,not be romedy.. it should be the lesson to teach the human, whats the life is??
— Alisha mariam
But she always kept on until the end. She knew, as i knew, that you don't stop a story half done. You keep on going, through heartbreak and pain and fear, and times there is a happy ending, and times there isn't. Don't matter. You don't cut a flower half through and then wait and watch as it slowly shrivels to death. And you don't stop a story before you reach the end. - A Creature of Moonlight
— Rebecca Hahn
The story became a cloud, and the cloud a sheet of rain, and rain fell throughout the empire.
— Alice Hoffman
Stories come in all different kinds." Hester scooted closer, clearly enjoying the subject at hand. "There's tales, which are light and fluffy. Good for a smile on a sad day. Then you got yarns, which are showy-yarns reveal more about the teller than the story. After that there's myths, which are stories made up by whole groups of people. And last of all, there's legends." She raised a mysterious eyebrow. "Legends are different from the rest on account no one knows where they start. Folks don't tell legends; they repeat them. Over and over again through history.
— Jonathan Auxier, The Night Gardener
Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page
— Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
History is a burden. Stories can make us fly.
— Robin Hood Doctor Who 8x01 "The Robots of Sherwood"
I had a dream about you last night... it was about a dreamer and a drifter walking into a bar. They start talking and swapping stories. No matter what the drifter says the dreamer always one-upped him. The drifter then woke up and realized he was the dreamer.
— Marshall Ramsay, Dreaming is for lovers
Most of the stories you hear about dragons are fodder for fools.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.
— Martin Shaw, Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet Black Branch of Language
All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.
— Alfred Eisenstaedt
But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.
— Joanne Harris, Doctor Who: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller
Fictions are realities we don't think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about.
— Sanhita Baruah
Our stories become self-fulfilling
—  we will always live up to the story. So make it a desired one
The three children had hear the story of the Duene lovers, but they interpreted it differently. And it does not matter, ultimately, what they heard or even what they knew. It is how they interpret the story that will make all the difference.
— Tiphanie Yanique, Land of Love and Drowning
But you're an artist. you should know there's more to a story than the part happening right now.
— Kate Messner, The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z.
All good stories - stories that touch your soul, stories that change your nature, stories that cause you to become a better person from their telling - these stories always contain truth.
— Camron Wright, The Rent Collector
I'd used people's stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone's tragedy for political gain was cowardly.
— David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
I think that for humans, the most regrettable of omissions, along with unshed tears and unexamined lives, is untold stories, the things not shared, the lost opportunity to be honest about oneself and tender toward others.
— Martha M. Moravec, Magnificent Obesity: My Search for Wellness, Voice and Meaning in the Second Half of Life
It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.
— Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life
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.
— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens 'em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.
— Jonathan Auxier, The Night Gardener
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
— Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.
— Brian  Doyle, A Shimmer of Something: Lean Stories of Spiritual Substance
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.
— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
My entire life, I've been fascinated with stories. To everyone else, it seemed like the story itself was enough. But I wanted to know why someone told the story in the first place. Had something happened? Or were they only wishing for something to happen?
— Amber Lough, The Fire Wish
Pilon complained, "It is not a good story. There are too many meanings and too many lessons in it. Some of those lessons are opposite. There is not a story to take into your head. It proves nothing.""I like it" said Pablo. "I like it because it hasn't any meaning you can see, and still it does seem to mean something, I can't tell what.
— John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.
— Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle
Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.
— Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell.
— Maya Lang, The Sixteenth of June
I love it when there’s nothingLeft to see but tiny spots of what’s still lightStories piercing the night.
— Anna Jae
How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.
— Linda Grant
It’s useful to make the distinction between reports and stories. A report is above all responsible for providing the facts, without manipulation or interpretation. Stories, on the other hand, are a way that people try to make sense of their lives and their experiences in the world. The test of a good story isn’t its responsibility to the facts as much as its ability to provide a satisfying explanation of events. In a few paragraphs, the reader learns of the problem (sales and profits are down), gets a plausible explanation (the company lost its direction), and learns a lesson (don’t stray, focus on the core). There’s a neat end with a clean resolution. No threads are left hanging. Readers go away satisfied.Now, there’s nothing wrong with stories, provided we understand that’s what we have before us. More insidious, however, are stories that are dressed up to look like science. They take the form of science and claim to have the authority of science, but they miss the real rigor and logic of science. They’re better described as pseudoscience. Richard Feynman had an even more memorable phrase: Cargo Cult Science. Here’s the way Feynman described it: In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.That’s not to say that Cargo Cult Science doesn’t have some benefits. The folks who wait patiently by the landing strips on their tropical island, dressed up like flight controllers and wearing a pair of coconut headsets, may derive some contentment from the whole process — they may live in hope of a better future, they may enjoy having something to believe in, and they may feel closer to supernatural powers. But it’s just that — it’s a story. It’s not a good predictor of what will happen next.The business world is full of Cargo Cult Science, books and articles that claim to be rigorous scientific research but operate mainly at the level of storytelling.
— Philip M. Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect: How Managers let Themselves be Deceived
There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
Everyone has a story - find yours!
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
You have to be careful what you write and not allow self righteousness to cloud your ability to be objective. This story is not about you, it's about people and things that no one else sees. The truth will at times come to you in a blur, unclear, unsettling refusing to leave until you figure out its relevance.
— Crystal Evans, Every Man Deserves A Good Jacket
Stories which have failed either to become popular folk lore or to be embalmed in old newspaper files are in great danger of oblivion. If they are saved, often it is by the merest chance. And that chance may well depend upon one individual with a treasure-story bent and a retentive memory.
— Ruby Elhult, Lost Mines and Treasures of the Pacific Northwest
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.
— Neil Gaiman
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
— Niall Williams, History of the Rain
For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.
— Steven Erikson, The Crippled God
A king is a king, but a bard is the heart and soul of the people; he is their life in song, and the lamp which guides their steps along the paths of destiny. A bard is the essential spirit of the clan; he is the linking ring, the golden cord which unites the manifold ages of the clan, binding all that is past with all that is yet to come.
— Stephen R. Lawhead, The Endless Knot
Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.
— Josh Rose
The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
— Steven Millhauser
How complex, untrustworthy, and important our stories are. We will never tell you the true story of our lives.
— Andy Quan, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered
Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.
— Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed
...stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also theonly way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.
— Ibraheem Hamdi, The Cashmere Scarf
I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.
— Karen Hines, Drama: Pilot Episode
All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.
— Andrew  Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
We're all stories in the end.
— The Doctor
Yes, life is hard,” whispers Erika, “but knowing about other people, other civilisations, other ways of living, other places – that’s your escape route, a magical journey. Once you know about these things, no matter what happens, your mind can create stories to take you anywhere you want to go.
— Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark
The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation
— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.
— Sara Sheridan
I'm a book girl--I love all the stories the world has to offer. No matter the book, I will taste it and drink it down.
— Mizuki Nomura, Book Girl and the Famished Spirit
History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.
— Sara Sheridan
I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.
— Sara Sheridan
Think about how much of your Bible, Old and New Testaments, is in the form not of doctrinal statements but of stories. Statements declare doctrinal truth; stories illustrate doctrinal truth. Doctrinal statements are like skeletons - bare bones, but absolutely essential to give form and order and interconnection to the body of revealed truth. Stories flesh out that skeleton, incarnate that truth, demonstrate how the doctrine looks and moves and acts in the real world of flesh and blood.
— Layton Talbert
As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom.
— Nicholas Trandahl
Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.
— Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife
I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.
— Sara Sheridan
I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you.
— Kelly J. Cogswell, Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger
I have my own stories. A few are known and some untold. Be a tragic one or a comedy one, stories are meant to end at a certain point. Stories... teach us whether we are the option or we are comparing.
— Upasana Banerjee
Winter is the time for stories, staying fast by the glow of fire. And outside, in the darkness, the stars are brighter than you can possibly imagine.
— Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth
Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.
— Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth
I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Tell the story you want to tell, and let it be as long as it needs to be. Worry about marketing it later.
— Patricia C. Wrede
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness… The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.
— Philip Pullman
…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.
— Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife
Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
Henry flopped onto his bed, and his steam leaked slowly out. He began telling himself a story in his head. It was about how just and kind and understanding he was. It was about right he had been, how necessary his tone and word choice. It was about a girl who just didn't understand, who was completely ignorant. Then, for some reason, the narrator of the story included an incident in which Henry ha pushed an envelope into a strange place just to see what would happen. It hadn't even been an accident. The incident did not fit with the rest of the story, so Henry tried to ignored it. He couldn't ignore it, so he tried to explain it. Completely different things. The post office was obviously not dangerous. It was yellow. I just wanted to see what the mailman would do. The flashlight was stupid. I didn't shine a flashlight into the post office. She didn't even act sorry. I would have acted sorry. I always act sorry when people get upset. She didn't even care that I probably saved her life. She didn't know. She was unconscious. Oh, shut up.
— N.D. Wilson, 100 Cupboards
Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values.
— Jeroninio Almeida, Karma Kurry for the Mind, Body, Heart & Soul
I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Three Incestuous Sisters
Light a campfire and everyone’s a storyteller
— John Geddes
ANYTHING IN THIS UNIVERSE CAN BE A STORY WORTH TELLING, AS LONG AS YOU KNOW HOW TO BEST TELL IT.
— Film Crit Hulk!, Screenwriting 101 by Film Crit Hulk!
The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste......It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.
— Jeffrey Panzer, Epoch Awakening
A trap, like a goodstory, needs to hint at greater things without revealing themuntil the prey is snared.
— E.J. Patten, Return to Exile
Being the reader of a dark fairy tale is much like being the hero of one. Our lives are filled with pain, boredom, and fear. We want to venture into the dark wood, to see the oddities and the beauties it holds, and to test ourselves against them. So we pick up a book of fairy tales. The real ones. THe weird ones. The dark ones. We see oddities and beauties galore. We test our courage and our understanding. Finally, we put the book down and return to our lives. And hopefully, just like the hero of the fairy tale, we return stronger, richer, and wiser. In difficult times - of recession and violence and political bitterness - we long for a dark forest to which we can escape; and from which we can return, better than we were before.
— Adam Gidwitz, The Grimm Conclusion
Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.
— William Carlos Williams
I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.
— Alice Hoffman, Green Heart
- 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.
— Neil Gaiman, Fables and Reflections
Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.
— Amit Kalantri
Every small business has to become a publisher—a publisher of marketing messages and customer resources, and a publisher of stories.
— Jim Blasingame, The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance
A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading towardone inevitable conclusion
— E.J. Patten, Return to Exile
One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story’s wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.
— Neale Osborne, The Castle of Desires
A goodtrap, like a good story, has to arise naturally from the environment.It has to be seamless. If the prey suspects what’s coming,they’ll bolt.
— E.J. Patten, Return to Exile
I prefer a story to a prayer.
— Hannah Kent, Burial Rites
You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.
— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½  Chapters
Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
Some stories end in despair, some begin there
— Marty Rubin
There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words...
— Lindsay Eland, A Summer of Sundays
While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.
— Richard Kearney, On Stories
The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.
— Mary Papas, Take Off Your Mask
When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
We are all joined in a circle of stories.
— Linda Joy Myers, Journey of Memoir: The Three Stages of Memoir Writing
Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.
— James Rozoff, Perchance to Dream
Stories are like DNA, they shape the culture that they’re a part of. A society is not a society without its own unique stories. But we allow machines to make our stories, nowadays, or at least to tell them. We allow things to shape our understanding of who we are. We are entertained, not nurtured. We are given Twinkies for our mind, things that amuse but do not enlighten. It tickles our taste buds, but it does not enrich us.
— James Rozoff
Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
Not everything is a love story.
— Ale Meza-Santiago
David had left her,taking his insane jealousy with him.
— Mary Papas, 14 Twisted Tales To Enthrall
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
— Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber
Most stories are based on something real.
— Paula Weston, Shadows
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.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.
— Jeanette Winterson
Why do bad things happen to good people?''Because it makes a good story.
— Andrew Kaufman, The Waterproof Bible
In between bites of banana, Mr. Remora would tell stories, and the children would write the stories down in notebooks, and every so often there would be a test. The stories were very short, and there were a whole lot of them on every conceivable subject. "One day I went to the store to purchase a carton of milk," Mr. Remora would say, chewing on a banana. "When I got home, I poured the milk into a glass and drank it. Then I watched television. The end." Or: "One afternoon a man named Edward got into a green truck and drove to a farm. The farm had geese and cows. The end." Mr. Ramora would tell story after story, and eat banana after banana, and it would get more and more difficult for Violet to pay attention.
— Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
— Neil Gaiman
Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.
— Andrew Kaufman, The Waterproof Bible
When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.
— Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
If folks don't like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories
— Ann Haywood Leal
A closed book will lie there like a dead horse. But an open book will kick, buck, and bolt through perceived adventures like a wild and free stallion. So hold on.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.
— Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir
And yet, wasn't the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears?
— Adam Langer, The Salinger Contract
I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.
— Sergio Troncoso, The Last Tortilla: and Other Stories
We all tell stories--to ourselves and to each other. Some of learn to tell only the most interesting bits.
— Shannon Donnelly
And so he set about restoring them, using the tricks he had learned over the years. He went to them, speaking to each of them in tones so low that none of the others could hear, getting their names, gently touching them, asking about their pains, their fears, gently eliciting their stories, reminding them of why they had run in the first place.
— David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident
The story you live is the ripple you leave.
— Michele Jennae
He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.
— Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner
I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.
— Jerry N. Uelsmann