c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.
— Alice Munro
Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby’s face, and in the adult’s face behind the mask. We find it in each other’s eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death.
— Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway.
— Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
I can't imagine a life without a story.
— Banana Yoshimoto, N.P
Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.
— Kathleen Tessaro, The Perfume Collector
But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.
— James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
I have always loved fairy tales, even now at the age when I am supposed to be too grown up and cynical for them.
— Claire Wong, The Runaway
We need stories in order to understand ourselves, for good or bad, to be inspired or horrified, it's how we cope with being human and how we decide what type of person we will become.
— Lily Graham, The Cornish Escape
He's a tourist. He takes pictures of people's lives, puts them in a scrapbook, and moves on. All he's interested in is stories. Basically Leslie, he's selfish. And you're not. That's why you don't like him.
— Ron Swanson
I am a huge believer in revelations and fun twists.
— Darynda Jones, Eleventh Grave in Moonlight
2 Hours for this conclusion is too much and it's ne big fucking lost......What we know about the world... people and so on and so on as it follows it's merely fromConspiracies, rumors and stories.
— Deyth Banger, 2 Hours
... We would be foolish to say of Miss Moss, for example, that the words female and store owner and tall and thirtyish and kindly an unmarried describe much of real substance about her, isn't that so? A great deal of who she really is are stories we do not know, stories she may or may not share, stories perhaps even she does not know the meaning and shape of quite yet. People are stories aren't they? And their stories keep changing and opening and closing and braiding and weaving and stitching and slamming to a halt and finding new doors and windows through which to tell themselves, isn't that so? Isn't that what happens to you all the time? It used to be when you were little that other people told you stories about yourself and where you came from, but then you begin to tell your own story, and you find that your story keeps changing in thrilling and painful ways and it's never in one place. Maybe each of us is a sort of village with lots of different beings living together under one head of hair, around the river of your pulse, the crossroads of who you were and who you wish to be.
— Brian Doyle
One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker.
— Ken Liu, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary
The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy. I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
¨Everything is ordinary to us until we get know its history. We start to see things differently when we do get a glimpse of its past¨
— Jan Prins, Dutch Stories: of his most famous region
The landscape always changed, but the magic never did. The tales were told to children wrapped up in sheets, to frighten or to soothe, but those doing the telling didn't have to believe. Perhaps it was just as well that they didn't, for the stories got so much of it wrong. They always do. The legends told of dragons and faeries, of locked towers and imprisoned princesses, and this was true enough.
— Emma Trevayne, Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times
Without stories, we are incomplete.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
If you read fairy tales carefully, you’ll notice they are mostly about people who aren’t heroes. They don’t have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.
— Amanda Craig, In a Dark Wood
Secrets, my mother told me once, are just stories turned inside out.
— Janet McNally, Girls in the Moon
Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
— Joe Hill, Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft
I heard the stories of the storytellers, telling the stories people wanted to hear. Everyone finds the narrative that matches the narrative they already know and want. It wasn't that I didn't want to share the truth. It wasn't that I feared the response. It was that I no longer believed in a truth.
— D.F. Lovett, The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon
Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. You can let the old witch dance at your wedding, hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping. You can just walk away, get on a horse, and go wake some other maiden from her narrative coffin, if you’re brave, if you’re strong. What do you want? Do you want to escape? Or were you looking for that candy house?
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams
I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with “BANG! Expand! Sssss…,” then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…
— Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist
There are gods and there are true knights too. All the stories can't be lies.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
The universe is made of stories, not atoms!
— Muriel Rukeyser
If books/stories and movies are going to be judge as for the personality of people so... Doctor Sleep and Nightmares and Dreamscapes... should make Stephen King the world top1 insane person, ever lived in the world.
— Deyth Banger
Stories require faith, not facts.
— T.A.  Barron
Such stories ask us to remember that there are little things in the world around us that we hardly notice but which contain great beauty and strength; that we might learn by taking a closer at places we already thought we knew; that we overlook important knowledge by not asking enough questions of the land around us; that some places in the wilderness are not for us to visit; that there are always small, secret wonders hiding in nature, just out of view.
— Ari Berk & Carolyn Dunn, Coyote Speaks: Wonders of the Native American World
....The important thing is not where we die but how we live. Being native to a place is a labor of love and a life's work. It means stitching your life to that of a place with a thread spun from mindfulness, attentiveness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. Stories knit these components of practice together. Flung outward, they clothe our relationships; flung inward, they map the soul. Stories enable us to enter and dwell attentively in a place; they enable us to travel and return, then eventually to leave for good. We need stories to stay alive spiritually: without them we would all turn into hungry ghosts. Stories are the only things we can take with us out of this world. They are the wings that bear us up or the chains that drag us down. In the end, it is stories that enable us to die.
— John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City
Did you know that writing stories down kills them?Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon
Life stories with themes of ruin can trap us. Life stories that are triumphant can transform us.
— Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now
Some people just want to be part of the story, even if it’s a story that’s completely fabricated.
— Paula Stokes, This is How it Happened
You lay claim to your stories; you honor, with your hard work and the best of your talent, their inspirations, and you fight to tell them well from a sense of indebtedness and thankfulness. The ambiguities, the contradictions, the complexities of your choices are always with you in your writing as they are in your life. You learn to live with them. You trust your need to have a dialogue about what you deem important.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
The Eδian encampment was quiet save for the crackle of campfires and the muted voices of soldiers, who where huddled in groups around the fires, discussing tactics or telling stories they'd never told anyone else, but needed to be told. In case they died in the morning.
— Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane
All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.
— José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons
Not everyone loves to read, but everyone loves stories. Some stories are told with words, some with paint, and some with music. Some are filmed, others are set on a stage. Some are sculpted from clay or woven in thread, and some are even explored in video games. The best ones are from other people, because they are raw and unique. But however they come, stories are powerful because they create something out of nothing: courage out of fear, knowledge out of ignorance, and hope out of despair.
— Trudy Adams
And she cries even more, for the way the universe keeps throwing her together with the players in her son's tragedy, like handfuls of dust.
— Clara Chow, Dream Storeys
Welcome, welcomePlease feel welcomedWelcome, oh welcomeWe are pleased to have you here.
— CJ Quinn
Sometimes we are able to better understand a theory or concept through a story… such stories teach you, enlighten you, and entertain you at the same time.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair
—  and some great stories have neither.
I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.
— Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot
There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.
— Steven Hall, The Unwritten, Vol. 3: Dead Man's Knock
Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre – La Vita Nuova – in 14th century Florence. Since I’m compiling this collection – my first indie publication – in Florence, just blocks from Dante’s house, and since his book involves a lost love, and ‘A New Life,’ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true.
— Neil Gaiman, 9-11: September 11th 2001, Volume 2
The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
Without a story there is no meaning.And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story.To understand this is to understand the true power of stories.And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling...Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?
— Steven Hall, The Unwritten, Vol. 3: Dead Man's Knock
Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people’s stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: 'The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.
— Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
I’m not… What’s wrong with them believing?” Bea asked, a note of pleading creeping, uninvited, into her voice.“You do not sell belief, you sell belief-in. Belief in true love, as if everyone were entitled to it. Belief in a simple solution to a complex problem. Belief in one type of person, one type of future.”“No I don’t. I offer people dreams, and hope, and, and, something to organise their lives with,” Bea said, not sure why she was trying to convince him. “I don’t make them into ‘one person’.” “Oh no? Let me recall your doctrine: Kings, Princes and their ilk must marry girls whose only asset is their beauty. Not clever girls, not worthy girls, not girls who could rule. Powerful women, older women – like one day you will become – are nought but wicked creatures, consumed with jealousy and unfit to hold position. No,” he said as Bea began to speak, “I am not finished. Let us turn our attention to the men. As long as the woman is something to be won, it follows only the worthy will prevail. It matters not if they truly love the girl, nor if the man is cruel or arrogant or unfit to tie his own doublet. As long as he has wealth and completes whatever trials are decided fit, he is suitable. For what is stupidity or arrogance when compared against a crown? The good will win, and the wicked perish, and you and your stories decide what makes a person good or wicked. Not life. Not choice. Not even common sense. You.
— F.D.  Lee, The Fairy's Tale
I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Innkeeper's Song
We learn through stories and scenarios, and this book is all about stories and scenarios. The purpose of the scenarios in this book is to help you understand some typical situations that confront middle school kids and how you can address each situation. Each scenario has a story told from the multiple points of view of those most affected by the story's situation—by the kid, by the parents, by the teachers, and sometimes by a principal or other adult.
— Dr. Kid Brain, Navigating the Turbulent Middle School Years: Common-Sense Solutions for Problems and Behaviors
So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.""You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.""That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Stories don't end," he says. "They just turn into new beginnings." (pg. 123)
— Lindsay Eagar, Hour of the Bees
Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other.
— Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
As you might expect, the geographical location of the capital of Fairyland is fickle and has a rather short temper. I'm afraid the whole thing moves around according to the needs of narrative.'September put her persimmon down in the long grass. 'What in the world does that mean?''I ... I SUSPECT it means that if we ACT like the kind of folk who would find a Fairy city whilst on various adventures involving tricksters, magical shoes, and hooliganism, it will come to us.'September blinked. 'Is that how things are done here?''Isn't that how they're done in your world?'September thought for a long moment. She thought of how children who acted politely were often treated as good and trustworthy, even if they pulled your hair and made fun of your name when grownups weren't around. She thought of how her father acted like a soldier, strict and plain and organized -- and how the army came for him. She thought of how her mother acted strong and happy even when she was sad, and so no one offered to help her, to make casseroles or watch September after school or come over for gin rummy and tea. And she thought of how she had acted just like a child in a story about Fairyland, discontent and complaining, and how the Green Wind had come for her, too.'I suppose that is how things are done in my world. It's hard to see it, though, on the other side.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Sharing stories that fill our chambers with an explosion of unique voices is a means to instigate an inclusive exploration of the intricacies of what it encompasses to be human. Stories enable us to comprehend the ultimate concerns of human existence and explicitly address the unalterable part of humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold
All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.
— Linda Hogan, People of the Whale
True stories are the best stories.
— Burbuqe Raufi
Some dark nights hide the cruelest of secrets. Such are the tales of the dark shadows hidden in that old castle in a distant land. The story of ages started with a classic
—  highlighting the infamous monster made out of a man.
A clear mission statement describes the values and priorities of an organization. Developing a mission statement compels strategists to think about the nature and scope of present operations and to assess the potential attractiveness of future markets and activities. A mission statement broadly charts the future direction of an organization. A mission statement is a constant reminder to its employees of why the organization exists and what the founders envisioned when they put their fame and fortune at risk to breathe life into their dreams.
— Fred R. David, Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases
We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
It's difficult from one story to jump in another story, 2 stories are okay for one hour. But more and more characters you start losing the link. (Thriller 2)
— Deyth Banger
Start Now, close your eyes for few minutes and then open them... so far it's going great... Now just think your three favourite things which you enjoy watching, like for example I like True Crimes, True Stories and so far Suspense.
— Deyth Banger
When did it start? Easy. Where it always does, at the beginnin.
— Mia Gallagher, HellFire
Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The road to home is when we find our hearts filled with the stories of our people.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
— Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.
— Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves
If you're nice, decent, attractive, get good grades and are talented, no one wants to read about that...They want to read what's out-of-the-ordinary, the scandalous, the shocking and the tragic. They want a story; they want to be captivated and what's typical does not give them that...unless, of course, that person ends up a victim, commits a crime or loses their minds via a love affair.
— Donna Lynn Hope
What I hadn't expected was to be blindsided by a history lesson that betrayed every hard-won experience I'd had as a player and now a coach at the same school I'd attended. . . Whoever was responsible for sending a championship team into virtual obscurity was either a serious egomaniac or just plain mean. It stung.After all, wasn't the story told at today's funeral the stuff of legacies? Of school lore passed on to the next class, and the next, building institutional pride as well as magical identities that made every kid in the state want to play there?
— Jo Kadlecek, When Girls Became Lions
Now there were no more stories to tell, to soothe, to comfort, to draw strangers close together; to link like hearts and minds.
— Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue
Listen. You will still only love me. And I will only love you. It’s only that we’ll have different names. Sometimes I’ll be Augusta, queen of Gondal, and you’ll be a dangerous highwayman. Sometimes we’ll be Alexander and Zenobia, the young lovers. Sometimes… sometimes we will just be two lonely children roaming the moors together. But the ‘he’ of the story will always be you, and the 'she’ of the story will always be me. Forever.
— Lena Coakley, Worlds of Ink and Shadow
People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
A man with a good story is practically a king.
— José Eduardo Agualusa
I could feel the beginning of the story gathering in her throat. Stories are that way, like storms. If you pay attention, you can sense them in the air.
— Kay Honeyman, The Fire Horse Girl
Pick any time of the day or night and somewhere, everywhere, stories are being told. They overlap and flow across one another, the pull away again just as waves do upon a shore. It is this knack that stories have of rubbing up against one another that makes the world an interesting place, a place of greater possibility than it would be if we told our tales alone.This is impossible, of course. Make no mistake, everyone's stories touches someone else's. And every brush of one life tale upon another, be it ever so gentle, creates something new: a pathway that wasn't there before. The possibility to create a new tale.
— Cameron Dokey, Winter's Child:  A Retelling of The Snow Queen
It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.It's all down to girls, one way or another.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.
— Criss Jami
Stories can save us.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
All stories are the sin of their weaver.
— Miyuki Miyabe
Stories are for joining the past to the future.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Is it true that some stories only just manage to be born? Or do these stories always seek their own path into the world and do they always, eventually, find a way of being told?
— Benny Lindelauf, Nine Open Arms
Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories
— J.R.R. Tolkien
From an author's point of view, the most painful and dangerous weapon ain't no gun or blade, but a piece of paper with the word rejected on it.
— Anonymous
The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?
— Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.
— Umberto Eco
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:"Ma'am..." or, "Kind gentleman... have you a little story to tell us, please?"And it seldom happened that they did not have one "given" them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the "korrigans" dance by moonlight on the heather.
— Gaston Leroux
Wait," Charlotte said. "I'd like to say something, if I may, Papa." He nodded, and Charlotte stood. Her siblings were still looking very grave. She hoped they were in the proper frame of mind to hear what she had to say, especially Branwell. "I have been thinking a great deal about ... My stories." She nodded significantly to them, willing them to understand that she was not talking about writing so much as about crossing over. "Papa was very wise when he called my writing a childish habit, and I think he understands that, for me, its a dangerous one as well."  The small square of paper that had caused such consternation lay in front of her on the table. Now she took it up and held it out, looking at each if her siblings in turn. "Emily. Anne. Branwell." She ripped the paper in half. Emily gasped. " I am renouncing my invented worlds and all who live there. If any of you are in the grip if a similar childish habit"- she raised an eyebrow at her brother - "I challenge you to do the same.
— Lena Coakley, Worlds of Ink and Shadow
All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
The greatest thing ever in the history of the world and of all of human endeavor from time immemorial is stories.
— Rainn Wilson, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy
Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
The vast majority of you are going to close this tab without, even for a single moment, entertaining the thought of writing something. Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Learning the fine rationalist art of CoZE (comfort zone expansion) is a really important life skill, and putting your writing online is a low-risk way to do that. Don't try to cop out with "I don't have any stories." Baloney. Everyone has stories; write up a memory that's important to you. And don't even try to tell me, "Oh, but I don't know how to write!" Neither did I when I started; I learned by doing. So please, set the excuses aside, put something up on the web, and share it with the rest of us. When you do, drop me a PM; I'll leave you your first review, but you have to publish something first. Well? What are you waiting for? Seriously. Go write one sentence of a new story, write now.
— David K. Storrs
Tell me a legend,” he said out of nowhere, and he realised they were making stories of each other, or themselves.
— Matthew Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood
When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories.
— Neil Gaiman, Stories: All-New Tales
The tales are only as dark as the teller.
— Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption
Stories can start revolutions.
— Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder
It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.
— Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder
The problems of the past.How the problems of the past, uncorrected, inevitably became the problems of the future.
— Erika Johansen, The Invasion of the Tearling
Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
PERCIVAL: Now, who is telling the story?SEVERIN: The camera is telling the story. It's watching everything, and you can't lie to it, or it will know.PERCIVAL: My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye.... Which of [the characters] is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?SEVERIN: They are all telling the story to me.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?""As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it's the other way around: one beginning and a whole Easter basket of endings.""Papa, don't be silly... A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That's the whole point. That's how it is in real life.""But that's not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realize that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.
— Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man
It’s hard to find good stories now.
— Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.Fire Up Your Writing Brain
— Susan Reynolds
I love books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.
— Tim O'Brien
Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is a writer, some are written in the books and some are confined to hearts.
— Savi Sharma, Everyone Has A Story
Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
Our stories are our best gifts--treasure and share them!
— Gail Kittleson
I've thought and thought, but there's no other way to give you the truth except to hide it in a story and let you find your own way inside. All stories contain a truth if you look hard enough - but it might not be a good truth.
— Kirsty Logan, A Portable Shelter
What we need now are new stories to share with each other, new tales to live into the world, which is to say, stories to make real by living our own versions of them.
— Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
Babies do not want to hear about babies
—  they like to be told of giants and castles.
When you meet a dark angel don't you ever for one minute believe they are bad because they have faced the worst demons and lived to guide you through yours. It really isn't an easy job they have been asked to do, but then neither was standing on the front line during the war in heaven.
— Shannon L. Alder
Surely you know that pleasure soon evaporates, into thin air?Then all we are left with are stories.
— Hanan Al-Shaykh
They've all got stories, Jess thought. I need to know them. Best of all, he could know them. He could learn anything here. It felt like limitless possibilities.
— Rachel Caine, Ink and Bone
We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.
— Rick Bragg
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...
— Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth.
— Alexandra Curry, The Courtesan
I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
A story is a garden you can carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for the truth.
— Alexandra Curry, The Courtesan
Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland
Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.
— Okey Ndibe, Arrows of Rain
If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
No two stories are the same. They may seem the same at first glance, but, once you take a closer look, give the story some of your time, you realise its unique qualities.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
When I was a kid, Granpa Portman's fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and to have your life made unrecognised by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be - THAT was magical.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.
— Ashwin Sanghi
Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?
— Yann Martel
On a cloudy day, when the dim dance of the firelight and the warmth of the sconces are not enough, the books shed their own form of light. By the hundreds, they fill the shelves that stretch across every inch of exposed wall. They rise up to the ceiling, warriors of an impenetrable army, encircling my over-sized armchair and keeping me safe as they whisper their stories softly in my ear.
— Kelseyleigh Reber, If I Resist
Life isn’t really linear. Although it’s generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that’s ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
It’s hard to say where a story begins and ends. You have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Somewhere between perception and reality. Between what is spoken and what is heard. Between what is written and what is edited out. 	I know this, you can’t have an ending without a beginning. Even if they are really just random pieces of the middle that tend to stand out. Staccato notes on the page. Points on a circle.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
You’re telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland.
— Imraan Coovadia, Tales of the Metric System
All stories are true, Astrea. By speaking them aloud, we bring them to life. Once words mingle with breath and sound, they become something new and alive.
— Hilary Thompson, Balance Broken
Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.
— Ashwin Sanghi
Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.
— Jane Yolen, Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft
A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.
— Jane Yolen, Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft
Here, there isn't much but stories and rain. And a fella can get tired of the rain.
— Tom   King
The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just don't have a happy ending.
— Jodi Picoult
These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right. I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.
— Elizabeth Wein, Black Dove, White Raven
Live as if they're going to tell stories about you.
— Shari Arnold, Neverland
In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.
— Guillermo del Toro
Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.
— Theodore Sturgeon, Sturgeon is Alive and Well
Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives.
— Alexia Casale, House of Windows
The story of the tree is written on every leaf.
— Marty Rubin
But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
There are subtle truths buried in every make-believe. You never know where you might find one.
— Shari Arnold, Neverland
Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story—whether it’s happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is—depends entirely on where you start it and where you end it.
— Judith Ryan Hendricks
A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles.
— Caren Gussoff, Three Songs for Roxy
The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold.
— Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters
I really do feel like I was born to write and tell stories.
— Christopher Barzak
Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.
— Josh Rose
[W]e wouldn't want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin places of pain and brokenness because readers can see themselves in the pain and want to journey from pain and struggle toward redemption or some kind of resolution.
— Ed Cyzewski