Stories Quotes - Page 15

History was more than just stories, he reminded himself as the men walked forward with their burdens. It taught lessons as well.

waitingin a life full of little storiesfor a death to come

People don’t remember lessons. They remember stories.

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

If folks don't like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories

What's usual for us may not be the same for everyone. I'm inspired by lives and stories of all those amazing people who overcome extraordinary challenges each day to live what we see as an ordinary life.

When a person sets out upon a journey - whether to hunt for food or knowledge, to make war, or even to visit the Otherworld - they are never the same when they return. Traveling changes us. Journeys shapes our memories and expand our experiences. Those things we bring back from the hunt - either food or knowledge - sustain us and keep us curious about the world. Think of your own travels and adventures out upon the land or in foreign countries: What wonderful stories do you have to tell? What experiences have you "hunted" or sought on your travels? What have you learned from the land? The stories told about journeys are as important (perhaps more important) than the destination. The journey lasts for only a fixed time, but the stories told of it, the wisdom brought back, can keep traveling forever, keep living, even after the tellers have traveled on.

Your eyes, ears and mind are imperfect in front of magic.

Stories don't end," he says. "They just turn into new beginnings." (pg. 123)

I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

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.

Yes", Kumiko said, seriously. "Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can't take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn't put it in story - ""And explain it -""No!" she said, suddenly sharp. "Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. The story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us." She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. "As it surely, surely would.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.

Without your stories, without your heroes and their awesome powers, how could you explain this, this here, this incomprehensible real that ever refuses to embrace any rule, any cliché besides the intransigent, pathetic truth that we all end, that no one comes back.

It’s so the stories go that the Ginen tell. If you find a beautiful fairmaid swimming in the river, her fish tail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she’ll ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh …“It’s my business,” he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground.If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

I had a dream about you last night... it was about a dreamer and a drifter walking into a bar. They start talking and swapping stories. No matter what the drifter says the dreamer always one-upped him. The drifter then woke up and realized he was the dreamer.

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

The path you create for yourself is the mark you leave behind when you’re gone from this world. All beauty and angst is stopped by the grave. But your words, your laughter, your faith, and spirit, refuse to die with you. They remain in the hearts and minds of those you touched.

But she always kept on until the end. She knew, as i knew, that you don't stop a story half done. You keep on going, through heartbreak and pain and fear, and times there is a happy ending, and times there isn't. Don't matter. You don't cut a flower half through and then wait and watch as it slowly shrivels to death. And you don't stop a story before you reach the end. - A Creature of Moonlight

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?

There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

It's one of the greatest gifts you can give someone, knowing their stories.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

A great director gives life to a work of art- gives it a heartbeat… a pulse… opens its eyes to the world.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

The stories we are destined to tell find us.

So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

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...

I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I don not claim exclusivity. Have it Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.

. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.

People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people

With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky.

Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

We are all joined in a circle of stories.

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Not long ago, I learned that if I let other people tell me how God was supposed to work in my life I would be dead. If I would have given into someone else’s version of God then I would have done nothing to improve my situation. The notion that “if it was meant to be, it will be”, is a pacifying, yet harmful quote, that many spiritualists use to soften the blow of anger. God is not passive. He is relentless, and he will build you through fire. He will put in your heart a need for answers. The intensity of what bothers your soul is often his voice trying to take you from the limited vision of mankind to the full view of the best life he would like to offer you. He is above any pastor, any bishop, any prophet, any church, any cleverly crafted sermon or multi-meaning verse. He is the master of his craft and the author of your forever. Inner peace is only found through action. Fear may darken the trail, but the light of peace stands at the end of such a journey ----waiting with truth.

There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

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.

It’s hard to tell sometimes if Etheny’s stories are true, as you will see, so I will lay down the story as she told it to me to allow you to decide for yourself.

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal

We're all stories, in the end.

Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans.