Quotes About Stories

A family is essentially a field of stories, each intricately connected. Death does not sever the connection; rather, the story expands as it continues unwinding inter-dimensionally

All for that welcome home dance, The most favorite of all-- when everyone finds their way back together to dance, eat and celebrate. And tell story after story of how they fought and played in the story wheel and how no one was ever really lost at all.

Until the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, it was illegal for Native citizens to practice our cultures. This included the making and sharing of songs and stories. Songs and stories in one culture are poetry and prose in another. They are intrinsic to cultural sovereignty. To write or create as a Native person was essentially illegal.

Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.

You savored each story they told you, and remembered the way the stars entered your blood at birth.

His expression I remember from the first time I met him. Open, direct. But no longer anonymous. I know certain telling details now. Like he can't stand his brother and he gets one haircut a year. He likes Raymond Chandler and John Irving, Wallce Stegner and Joan Didion. That he loves the blues and songs that tell stories. Riding the ferries just to be on water. His favorite flavor is caramel.

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way, he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, He certainly did. John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview. (Andrew Johnson couldn't read until he was fourteen! He didn't learn to write until after he was married!)

Our lives, and even our afterlives, are made from the stories we tell each other. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.

Some Heisenberg principle frustrates critics who try to analyze how stories are written. Whatever they can analyze has to be dead before it can be dissected.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Writing is a form attention and trains the writer's attention to find images and stories.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.

bestselling and award-winning author Wanda E. Brunstetter is one of the founders of the Amish fiction genre. She has written close to 90 books translated in four languages. With over 10 million copies sold, Wanda's stories consistently earn spots on the nation's most prestigious

This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is

I am therefore a ready believer in relics, legends, and local anecdotes of goblins and great men, and would advise all travellers who travel for their gratification to be the same. What is it to us whether these stories be true or false, so long as we can persuade ourselves into the belief of them and enjoy all the charm of the reality?

It's safer to use fiction, which will not be taken for literal truth, but which, like Jesus' stories, can tell the truth indirectly yetpowerfully.

I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.

your greatness will be made possible through the extremes of your personality—the very extremes that sometimes make for campfire satire and legendary stories.

Keep these things in mind: history and family. They are inseparable. In the 20th century you feel all those things that went before have very little to do with you, that you are immuned to the past by the present day. All those dead people and conflicts and ideas-why, they are only stories we tell another. History and politics and conflicts and rebellion and family and betrayal. Think about it.

I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses. The list of horror stories is endless.

As I described earlier, System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true. System 2 is capable of doubt, because it can maintain incompatible possibilities at the same time.

The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.