Quotes About Stories

For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you, and to know precisely where each one is located and what was happening in your life at time or where you were when you first read it is the languid and distilled pleasure of the connoisseur.

I was hired to tell stories of my experiences more of than for my soulscaping skills, because Atruscans love stories of any kind, and pester all travellers to tell a few.

History is stories, some of it embellished to make it more colorful, some of it remembered only in half-light, fragmented.

There is more truth in the old stories than you know.

For hundreds of years, Casmeer's libido had lain dormant, but now, as if the act of writing had rekindled a forgotten lust, he was moved to inflict his feelings upon his stories. He'd no intention of doing that. Also he felt as if the tales themselves were running away from him. He found it hard to keep them in line.

If I owned a thousand books, thought Shan, I need never leave this house. Everything in the world could be see through the eyes of those who'd written the stories and histories, who'd lived them.

There are many myths concerning our previous, more visible existence in the world, but these are now only stories with which to frighten children.

Stories happen around us all the time. Some are marvellous, some poignant, while others are tragic. Some are long and last for centuries, while others endure only for an hour. Who can tell when a story really ends?

The stories are true in a way. They do steal people. But not in the way we thought.

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

Comets are the icy heralds from a bygone epoch. When the Solar System was forming these icy leftovers brought water to the inner planets. Now they are merely ghostly messengers who write their stories in dust; each statement costs the comet dearly.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Research suggests that people rarely change their minds or form a new worldview based on facts or data alone; it is through stories (and the values systems embedded within them) that we come to reinterpret the world and develop empathy and compassion for others.

I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.

I have always believed that cinema is one of the greatest instruments of positive social change. Stories can be light, engaging and poignant, but they need to say something.

Something we learned from foster kids after sitting down with them to hear their stories is that so many of them are invested in social justice, and they're all invested in making the system better for the kids behind them.

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

When people hear I have six kids and 16 grandkids, they think, 'Oh, boy, you must get a lot of stories from them.' I don't. It's not like I'm behind the sofa in the living room taking notes while the grandkids carry on.