Quotes About Stories

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists

That is Christianity at heart: a single miracle surrounded and sustained by stories, like an island surrounded by the sea.

La resistencia está en el corazón de todas tus historias

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Stories have the power to make people feel. To give a shit. To change their opinions. To change the world.

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.

When you're in a family, it's not clear where one person's story begins and another person's story ends" -Autumn

These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story's done they ask many questions: "What is Man?" they'll ask. Or perhaps: "What is a city?" Or: "What is a war?

Buscar la verdad es la mayor virtud y es lo que hace que un drama sea interesante. No me interesa contar historias con perfume de rosas en las que todo va bien

More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we're going to end up. There're plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a Plot.

If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks

Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear.

a wonderful thing like hazelnuts hidden in chocolate surprises never forgotten secrets never revealed a quest for falling shadows in the voice of angels at dawn lately I wonder about nostalgia candy-framed moments of yesterday shaping times with tender hands I am stories dreamt before birth -- beyond death in a stranger's imagination

I raise a plastic glass. "To family." "And Faerieland," says Taryn, raising hers. "And pizza," says Oak. "And stories," says Heather. "And new beginnings," says Vivi. Cardan smiles, his gaze on me. "And scheming great schemes." To family and Faerieland and pizza and stories and new beginnings and scheming great schemes. I can toast to that.

Because stories tell a truth, if not precisely the truth.

At the end of a criminal's life, it's always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I've heard Grandad's war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it'll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies.

Cardan stands, too. 'Everyone finds different lessons in stories, I suppose, but here's one. Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway.

Stories like that were will-o'-the-wisps, glowing in the deepest, darkest parts of forests, leading travelers farther and farther from safety, out toward an ever-moving mark.

He could no more lie than any of the Folk, but stories were the closest thing to lies the Folk could tell.

She'd known he'd understand. Brothers and sisters had their own language, their own shorthand. She was glad to be able to share the weird, ridiculous impossibleness of it with the only person who knew all the same stories, with the person who'd made those stories in the first place. (pg. 117)

In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off it's head, say. A test. Not a test of love. A test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.