Stories Quotes - Page 13

And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.

The tales are only as dark as the teller.

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.

Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.

At seventy-one you can't expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?

It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.

As far as I can figure, the way that it works is this: everyone has something that happened to them. The thing that we each carry. And you can see it in people, if you look. See it in the way someone walks, in the way someone takes a compliment, sometimes you can just see it in someone’s eyes. In one moment of desperation, of fear, in one quick moment you can see that thing that happened. Everyone has it. The thing that keeps you up at night, or makes you not trust people, or stops love. The thing that hurts. And to stop it, to stop the hurt, you have to turn it into a story. And not just a story you play over and over for yourself, but a story that you tell. A story’s not a story unless you tell it. And once you tell it, it’s not yours anymore. You give it away. And once you give it away, it’s not something that hurts you anymore, it’s something that helps everyone who hears it. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain. It’s probably best if we just show you how it works.

When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be impo

Because zombies can’t go out into the sun, most of them tend to be afraid of anything that can go into the sun and live to tell the tale.

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.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

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.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

I left the bankbecause they wouldn’t deposit my cheque of poems.So I went to the store,but they didn’t acceptmy currency of words.So I boxed all my storiesand took them to charity.But they refused my donation and asked me to give blood instead.I opened the notebooks and made them look, 'What do you think I wrote these in?

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

I think that for humans, the most regrettable of omissions, along with unshed tears and unexamined lives, is untold stories, the things not shared, the lost opportunity to be honest about oneself and tender toward others.

Stories are the thing which shapes our kinky and wicked minds.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore...

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

True stories are the best stories.

A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Moral stories are always imaginary , but these stories induce real moral values in a human society .

Can you imagine a world without books to read?

When the rush of the weak sweeps over those that strive to be strong, its destruction. The commonplaces of moral judgment become fogged with the lack of perception stained with the sting of longing. The voice of reason is lost in the envious echoes of hearts torn by battle. The song of our children echo the misfortune of their parent's haze---we all started out small and had dreams to become something more than what we were.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.

You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?''Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.''Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?''A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?''Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End.

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.

Comfort yields complacency. Break free.

All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.

A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

A good story invites us into someone else's world where we learn, discover commonalities, and leave with compassion and understanding.

Love is the answer.

Real inspiration are not people, but their stories.

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.

The greatest occupation is the act of writing.

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.

Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

I don't write stories, I write characters.

Great souls, Great stories.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

But we also need stories. Great stories.

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

Sweep my dreams not beneath my feet. Be somewhere that my steps won't meet. Breaking the broom isn't a must. Don't mistake unmoved dreams for dust