c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Negativity an be negated through positivity only………so whatever the situation, always stay positive ………!!!Believe that You will never feel regret on this, moon will be there waiting for you………!!
— zia
Never bet against the man in the mirror.
— Cornell Thomas, The Power of Positivity: Controlling Where the Ball Bounces
When we focus on love,we shall experience love.
— Molly Friedenfeld
Never presume negative about someone promptly,You have no idea about the situation of them.
— amrahsaeed
I am a writer, period!
— Anita Sax
Simplicity starts in the heart, away from negativity and pessimism.
— Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Flashes of Thought
You can only do what you can, and what doesn't get done, just doesn't get done.
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild, as if by my evil twin. All week, I kept making lists and crossing things off them, ending each day with a sense of great accomplishment eclipsed only by complete and total exhaustion.
— Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
With positivity, one can emerge a winner under any circumstances, the reason being that the positivity brings positive changes. It is the seed of grateness.
— Vishwas Chavan, Vishwasutras: Universal Principles for Living: Inspired by Real-Life Experiences
The world is your lobster!
— Arthur Daley
We might not be able to change the entire world but we can surely leave a mark by positively touching people's lives one at a time.
— Lyra Parish
We all make mistakes, but it is those that learn from them that rise to the top.
— Taboo, Fallin' Up: My Story
Being positive in a negative situation is not naive. It's leadership.
— Ralph Watson
I can't change you and you can't change me, but together we can work to change the world.
— Germany Kent
Playful, positive sarcasm is different from negative mean sarcasm, and many people don't know the difference.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Surround yourself with beautiful and positive people, who love you and believe in you.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When you are positive you are the enabling force of possibility.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
You are nothing less than a miracle!
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Being alone will show you who you really are, and if you cannot get-on positively as the sole master of your space in that room alone, then you can absolutely forget about it after you add another person.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I am waiting for that Morning,When Me and My Dream, both will be Together.
— Shashank Rayal
Most of all, I'll remind them each morning that we make a choice to bring positivity or negativity into the world, and that within every single person where lies an extraordinary story waiting to unfold.
— Adam Braun, The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change
A person who has resolved to ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts – there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation – yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.
— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
positivity is the father of reinvention
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
Do not let your divorce define you and the rest of your life. Let go of anger and embrace the future possibilities of infinitesimal happiness
— Divorce Goddess
If positivity is not your mindset, then reset
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
If you take things the wrong way, be aware of which end is up
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
The way is open, ride the wave of success again today. You can't lose.
— Sereda Aleta Dailey, The Art of Manifesting Abundance
Key message to all patients: Let go of all negativity and empower your body through your positivity.
— Widad Akreyi
When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
Each of us has a finite reservoir of energy in any given day. Whatever amount of energy we spend obsessing about missteps we have made, decisions that do not go our way or the belief we have been treated unfairly is energy no longer available to add value in the world.
— Tony Schwartz
Spend as much time as possible with positive, joyful people and as little time as possible with negative, unhappy people.
— Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths
People live in fear of bad being out to get them, when in reality, the bad side is there only to be in polar opposite proportion to the positive that you are destined to thrive in. Conquer the negative, and thrive in the positive.
— C. JoyBell C.
The heart of man is vulnerable to negativity, but it could be easily fortified with positivity
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Positiveness of Soul is favourably gained through the Love Nature, rather than through mental prowess. Though attaining positiveness of Soul through the mind is possible; it is inferior to the positiveness that has been developed through the Love Nature (one's inner Soul nature to love and have affection.)
— C. JoyBell C.
Don't spread negativity, that stuff is contagious and ruins us. The good news is, positivity can also be contagious and it lifts us.
— Joshua Neik
It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.
— Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
Yes, life is hard, but it's not a bad way to pass the time. When all is said and done, I recommend it.
— Nury Vittachi, The Curious Diary of Mr Jam
When you get crapped on, grow a garden.
— Tanja Kobasic
In a half-empty-glass sort of world, I’m the little girl whose cup runneth over.
— Sheila C. Johnson
We are what we know and what we are good at. Whenever what we know and what we are good at increase, our position increases and our goals are achieved 
— عبد الكريم بكار
Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.
— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
All great literature is one of two stories
—  a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.
— Mary Higgins Clark
Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
To hell with facts! We need stories!
— Ken Kesey
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. 
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. 
— Chris Cleave, Little Bee
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
— Ernest Hemingway
Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.
— Michael Shermer
I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.
— Piers Anthony
I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
— Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, "and then everything burst into flames.
— Brian P. Cleary, You Oughta Know By Now
Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
There is no greater power on this earth than story.
— Libba Bray, The Diviners
[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--'[Opal] 'Was?'[J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.
— Maria V. Snyder, Sea Glass
Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.
— Sandra Dallas
If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great 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
I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours
— Jack Kerouac, Tristessa
Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.
— Lloyd Alexander, The Arkadians
If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?
— Lloyd Alexander, The Arkadians
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
— Colum McCann, Zoli
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? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961
People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
— China Miéville, Railsea
Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.
— Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.
— Scott Westerfeld, Pretties
To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
— Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.
— Jennifer McMahon, Don't Breathe a Word
Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.
— Ashly Lorenzana
The process doesn’t end there. Stories are more than just images. As you continue in the tale, you get to know the characters, motivations and conflicts that make up the core of the story. This requires more parts of the brain. Some parts process emotion. Others infer the thoughts of others, letting us empathize with their experiences. Yet other parts package the experience into memories for future reflection
— Livia Blackburne, Dalle parole al cervello
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.
— Baudrillard Jean
Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men. Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake. 
— Bill Willingham
The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
— Jean-Luc Godard
He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.
— Homer
How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
— Carolyn G. Heilbrun
I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life. Wherever I've traveled--Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan--I've found the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns,we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.
— Barry López
it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380
— Abraham Verghese
When telling the story of your life, it is of great value to recognize and focus on the details that reveal or inspire an empowered unfolding of your being. Much like rewriting your own DNA, every aspect of your life and growth will emanate from the building blocks of your history—however you choose to tell it. This is not to suggest that you should deny or bury your mistakes, traumas or misfortunes, but rather, recognize and reveal them within an empowered context of a bigger picture.
— Scott Edmund Miller
The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it -- and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.
— Francesca Lia Block, Baby Be-Bop
A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world. (Peter Nimble)
— Jonathan Auxier
A story is never complete.
— Jude Brigley, Approaches To The Study Of Stories From Wales
The only way to live several lives in one lifespan is to write stories.
— Vishwas Mudagal
We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.
— Roger C. Shank
Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.
— Nancy Mellon, The Art of Storytelling
Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher..
— Patti   Davis
Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in allplaces, in all times. 
— Rives Collins, The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling
Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.
— Jamie Michaels, Kiss My Book
I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle in a new pattern, a new way of being. It is a tradition that believes that the story speaks to the soul, not the ego... to the heart, not the head. In todays world , we yearn so to 'understand', to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells.So I do not offer interpretation. What I offer is to tell the story again, and again... on and on, if need be - until the ego has stepped aside and the soul can hear. I trust that the life of the story continues long after I have gone, if the listener can step aside and be taken up and in, to a world where words speak not to the mind, but to the soul.I invite you to trust it too.
— Donna Jacobs Sife
The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.
— Glenway Wescott, The Apple of the Eye
The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams
Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...
— Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
(...) a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.
— Andrzej Wajda
A tale spinner's goal is entertainment.
— John H. Alexander
Old stories sometimes slid out of her like lamp oil or light, stories containing details oblique and nearly incomprehensible to me or to anyone who has never known that world.
— Peggy Herring
The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.
— J. M. Coetzee
A world without fairy tales and myths would be as drab as life without music
— Georg Trakl
Storytelling is an ancient art that rarely receives the respect it deserves. Is it even possible to find someone these days with the time to give something precious to listeners, who understands stories at a profound level and can tell them without a book or a page in hand?
— Erika Eichenseer, The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales
A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.
— David Malouf, Ransom
The opportunity to tell our story unhindered, uninterrupted is rare. Most of the time people are so involved in their own concerns they do not listen with complete attention. It can be quite startling, therefore, to feel another person fully attending to you, present with you and for you, setting their own struggles aside in order to be available to God an dyou. Sometimes this is wonderfully freeing and at other times it is paralyzing. We find ourselves listening to ourselves, weighing our words, and considering if we speak authentically or frivolously. ... But telling our spiritual director is often a pure gift. As we spekk we begin to see connections that were hidden. Insights arise or our perspective about circumstances or ourselves may shift. There are Divine and human affirmations and confirmations. Sometimes the words we needed to hear come from our own lips. ...Interior developments arise out of silence that are beyond our clear view. We just know that something has moved or changed and that God is active...The opportunity to tell our story opens us to hear God's story more deeply - God's presence and participation in our lives and in the life of the world. In God all human stories connect and when we participate in spiritual direction, we seem to notice more of the connections.
— Jeannette A. Bakke, Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction
We had practiced bits and pieces of his story, but never the whole thing. In fact, I never heard Michael recount his own tale from start to finish.I wonder now whether this was because the full version would have led me to ask questions that Michael did not want to answer. He had so much to give—stories, reflection, engagement—that somehow none of us ever noticed just how much he was withholding. He could love everybody on the terms on which they needed to be loved, give everybody what they needed to receive; and so, in the end, none of us really knew him. I’ve come to realize that he didn’t quite know himself, either'.
— Danielle Allen
. . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.
— Mary Karr, Lit
In a storytelling event with the theme 'My First High', he felt sad listening to everybody's literal high moments.He had never been high before.Today, he had never been this low before.
— Bhavik Sarkhedi
For at least twenty minutes, she handed out the story.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
When we speak with others about our experience in Christ, it sharpens our attentiveness to the voice and will of the Father. Sharing our stories helps us clarify the intentions of our hearts toward the fulfillment of his divine will. A small circle of friends also reminds us of the presence, power and protection of the Holy Spirit. Confiding in one another instills a sense of hope for the future as children who are dearly loved by their Father.
— Stephen A. Macchia, Crafting a Rule of Life: An Invitation to the Well-Ordered Way
Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit.""Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. "You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I'm making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?""When the earth's shadow falls across the Moon.""Very significant. I'm sure it's a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.""Kind of trite." I said.He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life--his, everyone's--I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.
— Michael Chabon, Moonglow
Infinite possibilities exist within the art of storytelling. To me, it is nothing less than the magic of creation.
— Rai Aren
See . . . um . . . the thing is, I met with Lisa a few days ago. She wanted to apologize for . . . Halloween, and not calling . . . Thing is, her previous story . . . um . . . She wanted me to read it. She . . . wanted to explain her issues. She was jealous . . . of you and me becoming friends and . . . kinda lost it, I guess.My point is, um . . . she used the story to put it into words . . .I think she is writing messages. . . to you.
— Stjepan Šejić, Sunstone, Vol. 5
The most enduring and galvanizing ideas and values of our civilization are embedded in our stories, from those of Homer, […] and Virgil, […] and to Jesus. It seems to be in our genetic makeup to capture our best ideas in stories, to enjoy them, to learn form them, and to pass them on to others (25)
— Blake Mycoskie, Start Something That Matters
Some stories are easy to follow, and easy to tell. There is an introduction, a twist, and a happily-ever-after. And when telling the story, everyone forgets those small details, like that one quiet morning when the two of you woke wake up with the sunrise and talked about cookies. Or that night when she had her period, and the cramps were killing her, and she just needed your hug and something warm.
— Andrea Tomić
Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
So they went out for a walk. They went through narrow, lightless lanes, where houses that were silent but gave out smells of fish and boiled rice stood on either side of the road. There was not a single tree in sight; no breeze and no sound but the vaguely musical humming of mosquitoes. Once, an ancient taxi wheezed past, taking a short-cut through the lane into the main road, like a comic vintage car passing through a film-set showing the Twenties into the film-set of the present, passing from black and white into colour. But why did these houses – for instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool, which gave the impression that the family had valuables locked away inside, or that other one with the small porch and the painted door, which gave the impression that whenever there was a feast or a wedding all the relatives would be invited, and there would be so many relatives that some of them, probably the young men and women, would be sitting bunched together on the cramped porch because there would be no more space inside, talking eloquently about something that didn’t really require eloquence, laughing uproariously at a joke that wasn’t really very funny, or this next house with an old man relaxing in his easy-chair on the verandah, fanning himself with a local Sunday newspaper, or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through a window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader would shout "Come to the point!" – and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch which was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The "real" story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.
— Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange And Sublime Address
A story that must be told never forgives silence.
— Okey Ndibe, Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir of Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American
Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
The stories that contain badness are not bad stories. Rather, they are among some of the best. Because the storyteller who loves the children and gives the whole of his or her self to them by means of the tale—inviting at the same time the whole of the children's selves—is of all people the best able to confront true and truly terrible things with the children.
— Walter Wangerin Jr., Swallowing the Golden Stone: Stories and Essays
Storytelling is the very soul of humankind made plain for all to experience.
— John Appius Quill
I don't judge a scene or a line of dialog by whether or not it advances the plot, for example. Imagine an edit of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction wherein only dialog that advances the plot was allowed to remain. I don't obsess over the balance of conflict and interaction. I don't generally fret over the possibility that something I do may cause some reader to experience a "disconnect" (what an odious metaphor). I don't think in dramatic arcs. I don't spend a lot of time wondering if the plot is getting lost in description and conversation. To me, this all seems like a wealth of tedious confusion being introduced into an act that ought to be instinctive, natural, intuitive. I want to say, stop thinking about all that stuff and just write the story you have to tell. Let the story show you how it needs you to write it. I don't try to imagine how the reader will react to X or if maybe A, B, and C should have happened by page R. It's not that I don't want the story to be read. I desire readers as much as anyone. But I desire readers who want to read what I'm writing, not readers who approach fiction with so many expectations that they're constantly second-guessing and critiquing the author's every move, book in one hand, some workshop checklist in the other, and a stopwatch on the desk before them. If writing or reading like this seems to work for you, fine. I mean, I've always said that when you find something that works, stick with it. But, for me, it seems as though such an anal approach to creating any art would bleed from it any spark of enjoyment on the part of the artist (not to mention the audience). It also feels like an attempt to side-step the nasty issue of talent, as if we can all write equally well if we only follow the rules, because, you know, good writing is really 99% craft, not inexplicable, inconvenient, unquantifiable talent.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
— J. Nozipo Maraire
This is what storytelling gets you. You make things up that aren't real, and then get upset when they don't turn out as expected.
— Gregg Korrol
As usual, I shall tell my story badly; and you, as usual, will think me extravagant.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.
— John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story
Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling has been around since men and women were first created. Stories give meaning to life and provide people with history, information, and entertainment.
— Mommy Moo Moo
We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Many cultures accept the faulty nature of memory. They know even the photograph only gets it halfway right. They believe there is only one way to bring the dead back to life, story.
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.
— Walter Dean Myers, Monster: A Graphic Novel
Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The sparkling light inside of me multiplied billion times, hoping something beautiful will come along the way.
— Fernando Lachica, OFW: This is My Life and Story
Intermission. Mare Internum.We will have a brief pause now. If this novel were a theater, you could go out into the lobby, wait in line for a drink, or for the bathroom. Give people a chance to admire your clothes, hair, or jewels. Step outside for some air or a smoke. Backstage the crew would be busy transforming the scenery, actors would change their costumes and redo their makeup, Some would be done until final curtain, others awaiting their first entrance.But we're not in the theater, and I am not letting you go outside this story, not really. Where we are is more like a pause between breaths. Whether you're inhaling or exhaling, there's a pause just before, like the pause you can feel more than hear before the tide reverses. Where we are is the point of intersection in the figure eight. Turned on its side the eight becomes the symbol of infinity. You can make this figure with your hips when you dance. Over and over you will return to that moment of balance before your weight shifts from one hip to the other. The balance of this story is about to shift. The scenery is changing, as we make our slow way across Mare Internum. A journey I am not going to describe. When the story begins again, some of the people you have come to know and love, or not, Dido, Bertha, Paulina, Reginus, and Joseph will appear less frequently...I don't like it when characters fade form the story, so I am apologizing in advance, but life is like that. We leave people and places and times behind. We encounter new ones. Sometimes we can't see the patterns or connections, but they are there, between one breath and the next. In the ebb and flow of tides. In the rhythm of the dance.
— Elizabeth Cunningham, The Passion of Mary Magdalen
IN THE END, THE JOURNEY OF THE STORY BEGINS
— Goitsemang Mvula
All right. Then I'll begin... It's the tale of a man who drank the demon's liquor and gained immortality. That miserable man's lonely, lonely yarn. The stage is Prohibition-era New York. It's the story of the peculiar destiny surrounding the death sudden appearance of the liquor of immortality and of the spiral of people who found themselves drawn into it...
— Ryohgo Narita, バッカーノ！The Rolling Bootlegs
Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
If I drag it up from the bottom of the river, if I dig deep into that muddy floor and pull it up, even if I get most of it wrong, is it mine to tell?
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
Nothing unleashes curiosity in an audience like good storytelling. Nothing inspires storytelling, in turn, like the results of curiosity.
— Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. 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
It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalahari Typing School for Men
This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.
— Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Telling other people our life story changes us in a startling and profound way. The act of telling demands selection, prioritization, evaluation, and synthesis, which intellectual activities increase understanding, make us more sensitive to key distinctions in principles, and expand our empathy for other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.
— Robert McKee, Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen
People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.
— Francesca Lia Block, The Island of Excess Love
If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.
— Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son
I said, 'Then whered the other story come from? . . .'He said, 'It come in to my mynd.'I said, 'You mean you made it up.'He said, 'Wel no I dint make it up you cant make up nothing in your head no moren you can make up what you see. You know what I mean may be what you see aint all ways there so you cud reach out and touch it but its there some kynd of way and it come from some where. That place Hagmans Il I use to wunner about it every time we come by it til finely that story come in to my head. That story cudnt come out of no where cud it so it musve come out of some where. Parbly it ben in that place from time back way back or may be in a nother place only the idear of it come to me there. That don't make no odds. That storys jus what ever it is and thats what storys are.
— Russell Hoban
The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.
— Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith
I don't actually breakdance.
— James     Webb, The Listening Book: The Soul Painting & Other Stories