Stories Quotes - Page 18

But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.

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.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values.

Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

The written word is the greatest sacred documentation.

Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.

I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.

Come with me to the mountains. Every rock there tells a story.

I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

Don't be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

Don't judge me by my books. They're not my voices, and they were never my stories to tell.

The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.

Stories come in all different kinds." Hester scooted closer, clearly enjoying the subject at hand. "There's tales, which are light and fluffy. Good for a smile on a sad day. Then you got yarns, which are showy-yarns reveal more about the teller than the story. After that there's myths, which are stories made up by whole groups of people. And last of all, there's legends." She raised a mysterious eyebrow. "Legends are different from the rest on account no one knows where they start. Folks don't tell legends; they repeat them. Over and over again through history.

She reminded me that I could write stories,/could be struck by lightning & live.

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.

How convinced are you that man was created in the image of God when you can't see the image of God?

Most stories are based on something real.

We think that history is created in the big things, in the big events, but history is also created in the small things that we do every day, in the personal choices we make— to think or not to think, to hold our tongues or to speak up, to act or not to act. Our actions have a ripple effect on those around us. Every time we conform or don't, we're shaping the world into our vision or someone else's vision. The universe isn't made up of atoms it's made up of stories, and these stories are shaped in college campuses and coffee houses around the country, not just in boardrooms and government buildings.

Hold on to your heart and life will give you wings.

People who understand everything get no stories.

We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.

You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early... Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!

... Within the mind, especially the mind under great stress... boundaries of space and time are meaningless, and the... interior self lives by other rules and in other dimensions.

A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

All art is a form of vulnerability because at least part of the artist goes into the piece.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

I prefer a story to a prayer.

If typos are God's way of keeping a writer humble, plot holes certainly keeps one on their knees.

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

And so he set about restoring them, using the tricks he had learned over the years. He went to them, speaking to each of them in tones so low that none of the others could hear, getting their names, gently touching them, asking about their pains, their fears, gently eliciting their stories, reminding them of why they had run in the first place.

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

I had seen the world as either white or black.It is only when I read the pages of her diary that I understood why the sky looked so grey.

People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.

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.

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

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.

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens 'em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.

Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.

The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people’s stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind’s ability to exercise free will. Without a character’s ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human.

Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that can be the same for stories. It's just a matter of segregating comparisons between the senseless and the thoughtful. The norm and the unbiased. We are what we are. As are stories.

She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.

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.

All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.