Quotes About Stories

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

We thought it over, and drew a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever more-clearly-articulated stories: What's the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. Things get better, as the successful practise their sacrifices.

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what this meant. During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.

ideologies retool the very religious stories they purport to have supplanted, but eliminate the narrative and psychological richness.

And how can we possibly communicate with each other intelligibly about that attempt, trade information about the most effective conceptualizations, approaches, and strategies? The answer to that, as far as I can tell, is by communicating through stories about what is and, equally, what could be. And what that implies is that if possibility is the ultimate element of reality with which we contend, then it is stories that hold the wisdom that we most need to know.

Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about how we behave, when we don't know how it is we behave or even why.

Apelidaram-no de Professor porque num livro furtado ele aprendera a fazer mágicas com lenços e níqueis e também porque, contando aquelas histórias que lia e muitas que inventava, fazia a grande e misteriosa mágica de os transportar para mundos diversos, fazia com que os olhos vivos dos Capitães da Areia brilhassem como só brilham as estrelas da noite da Bahia.

So it is that both this breathing moment and what is called "the future"are always linked with what is called "the past." So it is that dreams become reality, that memories move back and forth between dreams, and that our stories are a swaying, dancing bridge between them.

las historias entretienen, transmiten conocimientos, expresan verdades, señalan posibilidades y potencialidades más allá de las formas normales de actuar

Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly—to be human. But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time.

Listen! Listen to stories! For spirituality itself is conveyed by stories, which use words in ways that go beyond words to speak the language of the heart. Especially in a spirituality of imperfection, a spirituality of not having all the answers, stories convey the mystery and the miracle - and the adventure - of being alive.

En los relatos de mamá, de la abuela, de la tía, estaban los grandes almacenes de historias. Sus voces han formado mi sintaxis, mis frases escritas no son más largas que el aliento que se precisa para pronunciarlas".

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

We must all take on faith the stories of our birth, for though we are in them, we are not yet present.

By telling many good-feeling short stories throughout your day, you will change your point of attraction.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily--perhaps not possibly--chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.

But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.