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Quotes About Stories

it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
~ Ted Chiang
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments
~ Ted Chiang
Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients was raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn't fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity—along with the praise of their owners—motivates them to explore the uses that text can be put to.
~ Ted Chiang
If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
~ Ted Chiang
La gente está hecha de historias. Nuestros recuerdos no son la acumulación imparcial de cada uno de los segundos que hemos vivido; son la narrativa que hemos ensamblado a partir de momentos escogidos. Y es por eso que, aun cuando hayamos experimentados los mismos acontecimientos que otros individuos, nunca construiremos narrativas idénticas: los criterios empleados para seleccionar momentos son distintos para cada cual, y un reflejo de nuestras personalidades.
~ Ted Chiang
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives:
~ Ted Chiang
A man-made satellite slowly pencils a line through one long passage in the lore of stars, but for those who know the constellation's stories, nothing can alter them.
~ Ted Kooser
I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.
~ Robert Kurson
Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.
~ Tom Junod
I want to continue to make beautiful movies. The most important thing is to be a part of beautiful stories, that's all I want. So I don't care if it's a Hollywood movie or an independent movie or a Spanish or American movie. I care about telling stories.
~ Melanie Laurent
'M Train' will take you in and out of dreamscapes and reality and remembrances with prose so spare and matter-of-fact that it delivers a much bigger emotional punch. Patti Smith doesn't need to embellish; she just tells her stories... and her stories are incredible.
~ Wendi McLendon-Covey
I enjoy stories that can spark a conversation.
~ Nnamdi Asomugha
In 2009, I edited, under the aegis of the Library of America, an anthology called 'Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.' It featured immigrants from different backgrounds, from black slaves like Phillis Wheatley to Yiddish-language speakers like Henry Roth.
~ Ilan Stavans
Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.
~ William Landay
I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.
~ Mike Flanagan
My specialty is two things: music or really strange stories.
~ Malik Bendjelloul
I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.
~ Ira Glass
Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.
~ Jenny Zhang
My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don't think I've written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don't think that would work.
~ Sue Monk Kidd
I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.
~ Kumail Nanjiani
My debut book is a collection of personal stories and advice about communication on the Internet. More specifically, the downfall of communication because of the Internet.
~ Franchesca Ramsey
I've read in various media stories that my dad and I had demanded guarantees of playing time or that we didn't want to play at Florida. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the exact opposite. We went in there and specifically said we weren't looking for guarantees.
~ Will Grier
When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
~ Junot Diaz
My songs don't deal with locations that specifically, even if there are very specific references to them in there; they're sort of just where stories happen, not the stories themselves.
~ Jens Lekman