Quotes About Stories

Instinctively and empirically we know that stories have the power and the potential to capture hearts and imaginations—we're just not sure how or why this is so.

every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.

Contrary to the cavalier attitude many pastors and religious educators take on this point, the Bible's narrative ingredients do matter for how we understand what's happening in a given book or chapter, along with how these individual stories fit together.

If we want the next generation to know where they came from and thus who they are, we tell them stories so they won't forget. Then they pass the stories on to the generation after them, and so it goes.

All her life, Sophie had been taught that books are precious. Each one holds people and worlds. Each one is a piece of someone's heart and mind that they chose to share. They were shared dreams.

None of them were recent, but that was the nature of family stories. They had to be far enough in the past that they took on a mythic quality.

I'm so lucky that I get to write my own music and write my own stories, so every single time I look down in the audience and I see somebody singing the words back to me, it makes it all worth it.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That's a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

Films are artifice. We're telling stories on film. At the same time, when it works, there is a real tough immediacy and spontaneity to it, and a punch.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.

Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn't worth the time and effort.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Não havia nada a fazer aqui, os livros derretiam-se nas mãos. E as histórias caíam em pedaços sob os golpes sombrios e silenciosos dos zangões. Sim, o calor dilacerava o coração. E só lhe resistia inteiro, virgem, o desejo do mar. Sara pousou o livro nos degraus da varanda. Os outros já estavam no mar. Ou, se não estavam, iam mergulhar de um momento para o outro.

She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.

Je verandert ook nooit. Altijd raadsels, altijd verhaaltjes, altijd geheimen.

Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.

My films are just stories, but that's all we have, the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. When you talk to the elderly, men and women at the end of their lives, you see that's what's left behind as the body disintegrates. Our stories. Our children will decide whether or not to keep telling them.

We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read. The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities; bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.

Wir sind alle Anthologien. Wir sind Tausende von Seiten lang, voller Märchen und Poesie, Geheimnisse und Tragödien und vergessener Geschichten ganz am Ende, die nie jemand lesen wird.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.