Quotes About Stories

In a world threatened by pain and death, stories of miracle workers are a psychological necessity, because the alternative is unmitigated horror and despair.

My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette's ...

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.

A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it.

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

We shouldn't be afraid of the obvious, because stories are about life, and life is full of obvious things like food and sleep and love and courage which you don't stop needing just because you're a good reader.

Stories...entertain and teach; they help us both enjoy life and endure it. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the things we need most in the world.

Tell them stories. That's what we didn't know. All this time, and we never knew! But they need the truth. That's what nourishes them. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, everything. Just tell them stories.

La respuesta emocional del lector es algo muy valioso. Los relatos tienen que ganarse sus propias lágrimas, sin hurtarlas de ningún otro sitio.

Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories.

When the Devil gets bored he tells stories to his bats and these bats fly to us and give us these stories as nightmares.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.

This was what Joon thought Christianity meant! Food and medicine for the body, and stories for the heart if you begged for them. Then he came here, found a country full of people begging not to hear the stories, went to seminary, and found out why. No food. No medicine. No doing unto others. Just a bunch of men learning how to bellow the stories at others whether they wanted to hear them or not!

Lewis said, "Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."[3] He was saying that stories can align reason with imagination and mind with emotion. When truth is put in imaginative form, it can be driven not only into the mind but also into the heart.

It is its own form of conversation -- you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.

I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.

yarn, n. Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once. Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eights-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true.

I was still trying to impress you, and I still wanted to be impressed by you, so I could pass along pieces of your impressiveness in stories to my friends, convincing myself this was possible.

There's truly a story on every corner. But still might be a shock, to realize you are just one story walking among millions

No, Tiny. Words. Passion. The danger of falling in love is you mistakenly believe the loved one is the only source of passion in your life. But there is passion everywhere. In music. In words. In the stories you tell and the stories you see. Find passion everywhere, and share it widely. Don't narrow it down to one thin line.

I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story but passing by too quickly to notice or understand

This is why we love stories, and love them from an early age: Nothing bad ever lasts in stories. And this is ultimately why we love life, too--because nothing bad ever lasts in life, not with the same intensity with which it initially appears. If we pay attention, stories can teach us that.