Quotes About Stories

Books are like dragons....if we do not believe in them, and read them, they will cease to exist. How, then, will we learn the language and understand the stories of the dear dead ghosts of the past? Save the Dragons. Speak Dragonese. Read a book.

This is the problem with stories. Stories always mean something. The question is ... What exactly do they mean?

Stories come from somewhere, said the witch. The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise.

I flew back to England with Julian, who was happy and full of stories about John—he'd recorded Julian playing drums in the studio, then used the result on one of the tracks for his new album, Walls and Bridges. When it came out a few months later, Julian was credited, which thrilled him.

Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.

She's got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.

the journalistic jargon of the newspaper is the highest expression of experiential poverty – a lesson that Benjamin learned from Karl Kraus.8 As Benjamin comments, 'every morning brings us the news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.

Podría decirse que los proverbios son ruinas que están en el lugar de viejas historias, y donde, como la hiedra en la muralla, una moraleja trepa sobre un gesto

Woz spent a lot of time at home reading his father's electronics journals, and he became enthralled by stories about new computers

Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.

By early 1778, Voltaire was 84 and ailing, and there had even been stories that he had died. (His retort, even better than Mark Twain's similar one, was that the reports were true, only premature.)

I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.

realized that even though I was a ghost, I was the one being haunted by the animosity I'd worn like a badge through my life. I never made anything of myself, and I held Mira back. I wrote stories that I knew would never be published, and I hated freely. I was my own private hell.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

All those stories about time travel, they were comforting, and at the same time it bothered me how they always made it seem fun and how everything fit into place, how things could only ever be how they were supposed to be, how the heroes found a way to change the world while still obeying the laws of physics.

Now where am I? You're in the interstitial matrix that fills up the space between stories. Who said that? You did. I did? Wait, who am I? You're you. Oh, good. Thanks. Seriously, where are we? We're in a shuttle. I'm taking you back to where you were in story space.

People meeting for the first time suddenly relax if they find they both have cats. And plunge into anecdote.

Generosity says a great deal about a person's emotional and spiritual development. When it's hard to give, or it feels like ripping away a part of the self, we are still anchored in our attachments or stories we've created about scarcity. If this applies to you, make friends with the part of you that feels resentful or finds it difficult to give.

A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.

We probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories, afterwards for his characters. . . . To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading this world-teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us, and unconsciously mould our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life.

School-stories might as well be called friend-stories, really, that just happened to be set in boarding schools.