c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Still, truth is how I remember it now. In a way, I am changing the past from my desk here in the future as I write. It always happens like this. This is how we all tell our story.
— J.D. Radke
Margherita Margheritone put the pot of water on the fire and the Wicked Witch emptied the sack into it and the little wash-bear jumped out and started biting both of them, went down into the yard and started eating the hens, and threw all the rubbish into the air.
— Niccolò Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared
While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.
— Norman Lock, American Meteor
I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage...
— Mark Waid, Daredevil, Volume 7
The Bible provocatively evokes desire.
— Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith
If we all got fed up at the same time, which could happen coming on evening, we would all sit down and Mick would sign a song. We learned many songs while setting spuds and many a story was told, imaginary or otherwise. We understood well the story of the Gobán Saor, an old Irish legend. The Gobán Saor ruled a large kingdom which he wanted to leave to the cleverest of his three sons. One day, he took his eldest son on a long journey and after some time walking he said: "Son, shorten the road for me."The son was totally at a loss as to how to help his father, so they returned home. The following day the Gobán Saor took his second son, and again the same thing happened. On the third day he took his youngest son and after they had travelled some distance he said once more: "Son, shorten the road for me."The youngest son immediately began to tell his father a story that was long and interesting, and they became so engrossed in the tale that they never noticed the length of the journey. In our lives, Mick was the Gobán Saor's youngest son.
— Alice Taylor, To School Through The Fields
How well do you know the people who raised you? Look around your dining room table. Look around at your loved ones, especially the elders. The grandparents and the aunts and uncles who used to give you shiny new quarters and unvarnished advice. How much do you really know about their lives. Perhaps you've heard that they served in a war, or lived for a time in a log cabin, or arrived in this country speaking little or no English. Maybe they survived the Holocaust or the Dust Bowl. How were they shaped by the Depression or the Cold War, or the stutter-step march towards integration in their own community? What were they like before they married or took on mortgages and assumed all the worries that attend the feeding, clothing, and education of their children? If you don't already know the answers, the people who raised you will most likely remain a mystery, unless you take the bold step and say: Tell me more about yourself.
— Michele Norris
The Queen died. The King died.”“The Queen died. And the King died of a broken heart.”The first line was fact. The second line was a story. It placed the facts in context, added emotion and made us connect to it by making it memorable.
— Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
What do you know of the Knights?” he asked. Fin shrugged. “I thought knights were only in children’s stories until a few days ago.” Jeannot smiled. “A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance.” “Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren’t true. You might be knights, but I don’t see any shining armor,” Fin said. Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. “Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso. The path set before us. The race we must run.
— A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Mom was the midwife who delivered stories to me.
— Rachael Hanel, We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter
Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.
— Ada Maria Soto
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
He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron".
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit.
— Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
My story being done,She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:She swore,––in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange;'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'dThat heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,I should but teach him how to tell my story.And that would woo her.
— William Shakespeare, Othello
Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
Stories are important too. Stories help make sense of things. They make you believe you can do things. They help you imagine that things may be different, that if you just have enough courage... or faith... or goodness... you can change things for the better.
— Kate Forsyth, The Wild Girl
Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.
— Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is
—  so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
You must liberate your mind of such dogmatic ideals, rid yourself of this unending illusion that stories have clear beginnings and endings. Stories never begin, nor do they end. They are comprised of people living an endless cycle of interacting, influencing each other, and parting ways. As long as stories are told they should not have clear endings.
— Ryohgo Narita
Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication
— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control over it--they know they've changed it, and we know they've changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: you are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you're a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in . . . not just a story, but a good story. One written in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a system. Everyone relaxes.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.
— Jonathan Gottschall
Be an advocate for the people and causes important to you, using the most powerful tool only you have—your personal stories.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage
Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades.There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
I am the unseen. For centuries I have been here, beneath this great city, this metropolis. I know your language. I know all languages. . . . My cave is broad and cool. The sun cannot send its heat down here. The damp soil is rich and fragrant. I turn softly on my back and place my eight legs to the cave ceiling. Then, I listen. I am the spider. I see sound. I feel taste. I hear touch. I spin this story. This is the story I’ve spun.
— Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon
I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
— Oliver Sacks
Anchor Your Stories in Redemptive Themes So We Are Moved to Live Up to Them: Rather than making yourself the victim or the hero in the stories you tell, describe a daunting time of loss, crisis, or criticism or where you made a mistake or acted badly, yet you were eventually able to learn from it. Such stories show vulnerability and a desire to grow and live fully rather than in fear. Then that facet of you can be the place where others can positively and productively connect with you, hard-earned strengths firmly attached together. You can support each other in reinforcing redemptive characterizations and action.
— Kare Anderson, Mutuality Matters How You Can Create More Opportunity, Adventure & Friendship With Others
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]
— Pierre Berton
All fiction boils down to two plots: Either a stranger comes to town or someone goes on a trip.
— Parker Bauer
Say It So You Lift Your Spirits: Even non-Scandinavians and optimists can feel their moods dampen during the dark of night. Luckily there are some easy ways to lift your spirits. Here are three:1. When describing something in the past, what role do you play in the story? Are more of your most retold stories anchored by a positively or a negatively felt incidents? Those who are most resilient, energetic, caring and involved with others tend to link their stories to redemptive themes.Those who are plagued by down moods often mark their stories with what went wrong and don't include a redeeming detail. These narrative themes affect our choices -- what we think we have to choose from -- and how others see us.2. We each have many personalities inside us. Some situations enable us to use our best talents and display our best side. Instead of attempting to be a "virtuoso juggler" as many women do, discover the specific situations where you thrive. When you can identify those moments you are better able, like a defensive driver, to see potential danger farther ahead where situations or individuals spark your discomfort or worse.Conversely, knowing where you shine (temperament and talent) means you can make smarter choices about how you work and live -- and with whom. While Marcus Buckingham's book is intended for women, I know three male friends who have found it helpful in how they seek the situations that best serve them -- professionally, personally and socially.3. We each have a set point along the continuum of pessimistic to optimistic. After winning the lottery or experiencing the death of a loved one, we eventually return to that set point.
— Kare Anderson, Moving From Me to We
It’s not by story alone that successful advocates urge others to take action. Advocating with our personal stories takes a specific kind of preparation. It requires practice with elements of persuasion, public speaking, media interview skills and storytelling—not to mention healthy does of fortitude and commitment.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage
All of our lives were a story
—  their magic came in their retelling. Words could give life everlasting rebirth.I would accept this challenge. I would use my breath to give life.
It's easier to make up storiesthan it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The storywakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says, Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Asking storytellers to be genuine is like, asking a chain smoker to quit smoking . Habit of lying isn't easy to fix. Pretend as believing is like selling cigarettes. What else we could do, if we want them to be in our lives...
— Heshan Udunuwara
Here’s the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes—especially the most verboten and destructive ones—the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it’s simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality—metaphor, irony—and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it’s what you can’t say that makes it lasting?
— Laura Kipnis
Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.
— Andrew Solomon
It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to enhance the relationship between the teller and the hearer. This principle seems to be reflected in the stories that were handed down from the community around Jesus. Again and again, early Christian stories suggest that virtue is not enough. The lives of families and communities can only really flourish where virtue takes second place to love.
— Kate  Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women
Storytelling is an essential part of our cultural and human identity...when we become afraid of stories outside the mainstream, I believe we have lost a valuable part of our cultural inheritance and growth.
— Louise Sommer
Sharing our story is one way we create intimacy. And like a good novel, it’s more engaging – and lasting – when we allow it to gradually unfold.
— Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road
...have always been known for their storytelling. It appears to be the supreme expression of their spirit. Perhaps they know that, without a story, there could be no nation, no culture, no civilization, no life.
— I. Murphy Lewis
The deep map configures narratives. It is a matrix of intertexual storytelling, charting our movements through the landscape.
— Linda Lappin, The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci
Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies.
— Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account
Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.
— Aurin Squire
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
— Salman Rushdie
..so Grandpa turned the rusty latchkey of his magnificent remembery and set free a symphony of stories
— Glenda Millard, The Duck and the Darklings
A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.
— Matthew J. Kirby
Without desire how is it possible to make a story?
— JM Coetzee
Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear.
— Ann Patchett
No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
That's the problem with revealing true truths. They make people uncomfortable. The truth should be grand and exotic, but mostly it isn't. Mostly it's uncomfortable.
— Leslie Pietrzyk
No one cares about the art of the lie at this point. They insist on impressing with the truth. See me! Look at me! Look at who I am! Look at who I want you to think I am!
— Leslie Pietrzyk
I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid 'us vs. them.
— Aspen Baker, Pro-Voice: How to Keep Listening When the World Wants a Fight
Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.
— Joss Whedon
All through the winter months, Rose kept up the practice of sitting by the fire with Peter and a book telling him stories. The doctor stopped to listen one afternoon out of curiosity, and heard her say, “…then the Mermaid said to the Pirate, ‘I would rather perish with the boy than go with you.’ And the Pirate said, ‘So be it,’ and sealed them both up inside the treasure chest. Then the pirate’s crew got together to lift the chest up, and with a nod from their captain, they cast the chest overboard into the sea. The chest was so heavy, it sank in the water in spite of the air inside, and in seconds it was gone from view, disappearing into the deep blue depths. If the boy and the mermaid were unable to free themselves, they would surely perish.” Peter’s eyes were wide with interest. “But- I can’t tell you what happened- you’ll have to find out next time.” She stopped and closed the book. Peter shook his head and put his hand on the book. She laughed and said, “You want to hear more now, do you?
— Christopher Daniel Mechling, Peter: The Untold True Story
Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.
— Robert E. Barron
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
— Nadia Hashimi
Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
— Ashly Lorenzana
The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling of the old stories...We are grounded in its power. It is our connection to each other and to the larger universe.
— Robert William Case
Great stories build relationships and make people care. Those two things are necessary to change anything.
— Shane Snow, Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.
— Cynthia Ogren, Beautiful Monsters
Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday's and transported them to palaces in India, canals in Holland, pioneer stockades during the Indian wars, cattle ranches in the West, mountains in Switzerland, pagodas in China, igloos in Alaska, jungles in Africa, castles in England, slums in London, gardens in Japan, or most important of all, into happy homes where there were mothers and fathers and no Mrs. Mondays or Marybelles.
— Betty MacDonald, Nancy and Plum
I Write books for the little girl in the adult woman who some man told she was not good enough. Let us dismantle the notion that a woman cannot be free with her sexuality or that she needs a man to make her complete. This one is for the little girls with hearts on their sleeves.
— Crystal Evans
Zac dangled his legs off the edge of the building, hanging onto every word I said as though I were some old time bard telling an epic war tale. I tried to be as detailed as possible, and I knew that I was doing a good job when he'd lean back and shut his eyes. He'd breathe slowly and watch the pictures that I painted for him with my words. He'd smile, not a cunning toothy one, but a sincere smile that comes only from being truly happy. I'd sit across from him and just watch his reactions. We could be up there for hours. I would see the sunset across his face and be as captivated with his skin's changing colours as he was with my everyday stories. That's when I learned to dislike winters.
— Ashley Newell, Freakhouse
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and laughter 'til they bloom, 'til you yourself burst into bloom.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The Rough Beast snorted. “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.”Caperton studied him. “Somebody at my job just said that.”“It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing--public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.”“But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?” Caperton said. “All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?”The Rough Beast shrugged. “Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.
— Sam Lipsyte
But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
— George Eliot
People want to do business with you because of 'who you are' and 'what you stand for'... not because of 'what you do'."Create your story... publish it online and make sure people will find you when they Google you.
— Anouk Pappers & Maarten Schäfer, Coolbrands - The Guru book
People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.
— Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.
— Michael Montoure, Slices
It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle. I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life's complexity more comprehensible. It's a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium.
— Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods
Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.
— Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
Plot comes from the mind but the characters come from the heart!
— Varsha Dixit
In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
— Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock
Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.
— Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle
The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.
— Steve House, Beyond the Mountain
One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It’s the same thing: a child asks, “What’s going to happen next?” When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it’s not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don’t want to test that simple sense of being human. I don’t want to transform it.
— Ayad Akhtar
Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element
— Bascomb James, Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures
This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.
— Wendell Berry, Fidelity
Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything that we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partially responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens, or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone—though not necessarily to the same person—and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping might scrutinize, set aside, and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once, although...it must be told when the time is right, or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognize that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another.
— Javier Marías, All Souls
Too much truth destroys.
— Sara  Stark, An Untold Want
Even though this princess loved the oak and the castle and her mother, the queen, she tired of the beautiful swamp, of her surroundings. You see, as she grew she came to realize that if she looked too closely, she could recognize evil things in the swamp as well as all the extraordinary things she loved. There were hurtful, malicious things, things that grew quickly, quick enough to ensnare her and smother her if she wasn't careful, maybe even quick enough to steal her life away.
— Sara  Stark, An Untold Want
Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
The folly and the glory of the world... the wild, the wise and the wicked... the hero, the madman, the wanderer and the fool... the earth, the seas, the wild heavens... are all part of an endless, unfolding tapestry, woven by time and hemmed by memory.
— Brian Holguin, Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal: Creation Myths, Volume 1
Wish not for treasure you can hold, No gleaming jewels, bright and cold, For finer still than pearl or gold, The treasure of a tale well told...
— Brian Holguin, Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal: Creation Myths, Volume 1
Her favorite stepping-aside technique was to lay out a dizzying mountain of complex steps and then pronounce the conclusion self-evident. Excuse me? Things that are self-evident don't need you or the presentation anyway. Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.
— Charlotte Beers, I'd Rather Be in Charge: A Legendary Business Leader's Roadmap for Achieving Pride, Power, and Joy at Work
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
— Neil Gaiman
'So what happens next?' 'Everybody dies, and the people who don't get married.' 'Like any other story, then.' 
— Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.
— Robert Quillen
If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.
— Dorothy Allison
A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.
— George Saunders
One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.
— Sara Sheridan
We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.
— Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story
A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Tell me half a cup’s worth of story and we’ll call it a night.
— Kelley Armstrong, Exit Strategy
we compose our life in stories we tell ourselves
— John Geddes
There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life.
— Colm Tóibín, The South
You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
— Sara Sheridan
Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.
— Steve Almond
Online personal branding is not about self-promotion... it's about transferring your real world reputation into the online world.
— Maarten Schäfer, Around The World in 80 Brands
It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.
— J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.
— Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven: A Novel
Many more have died of attempting love than victory, and countless numbers hate love more than war. Honor has often been the dear prize awarded to the killers of lovers. The epics of war have always and still outnumber the epics of love. For those who love deeply and greatly gain a clairvoyant, excruciating awareness of the fear and suffering of the world along with their joy, which few warriors could endure. Who is not more truly afraid of a love story than of a tale of war?
— Patricia Storace
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it shor
— Henry David Thoreau, Letters to Various Persons
and their days make no story for they were good and joyful and without event
— Tanith Lee, Night's Master
A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivete-that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity.
— Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan
I travel the world. I Take nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time and leave nothing but footprints.
— Maarten Schäfer, Around The World in 80 Brands
That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?
— Pete McCarthy, McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland
Storytellers think they're writing for the audience. They're writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.
— Chuck Wendig
It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.
— Edna Ferber, Giant
The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.
— China Miéville, Kraken
Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.
— Jincy Willett, Jenny and the Jaws of Life: Short Stories
The Leadership Seduction of storytelling invites self-pity, exaggerates one's importance, and encourages inaction.
— Catherine Robinson-Walker, Leading Valiantly in Healthcare: Four Steps to Sustainable Success
And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.
— Neil Gaiman
It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.
— Osamu Dazai, Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy
Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.
— Richard Kearney, On Stories
Though a story may begin as a lie, perhaps it can be made true. Perhapsd their ultimate power is found in how they inspire us to action.
— Matthew J. Kirby, Icefall
In this time of 'information overload', people do not need more information. They want a story they can relate to.
— Maarten Schäfer, Around The World in 80 Brands
Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned.
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature.
— Mike McRae, Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs and Bad Ideas
Mama always did tell a good story, built a solid background, then deftly lead her engrossed listener through a series of doorways, enticing them in before delivering the coup de grâce.
— Wendy Jean, Unstolen
The Dreamer awakesThe shadow goes byThe tale I have told you,That tale is a lie.But listen to me,Bright maiden, proud youthThe tale is a lie;What it tells is the truth.
— Traditional folktale ending
Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.
— A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator
Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.
— James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.
— Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
You bound him to you with your courage and your tales. You hold him to you now. You captured a wild creature when you had no place you could keep him.
— Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows
But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always.
— Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet
The heart is a repository of emotions--real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future--and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell.
— A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator
Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.
— Bryce Courtenay
Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it--make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about history or some recent event.
— A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator
Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.
— Patricia Hamill