Quotes About Stories

To the people who told these stories all the universe was alive with the same kind of life they knew in themselves.

It may seem odd to say that the men who made the myths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts; but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are...

For all that I loved the old tales of magic, I did not actually want there to be talking animals and mysterious requests on storm-tossed nights. Such things were for stories and ought to remain there.

He was amused by their 'ass stories' ( histoires de cul ) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before.

I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be.

There are a lot of sad stories. It seems like everybody has one to tell.

by John Updike; he, intent on a paperbound anthology of science fiction stories edited by Hans Stefan Santesson.

What he had not foreseen about Miami, though, was the plethora of stories like his. He had also not realized that there would be homeless families sleeping under a bridge a few feet from the luxury hotel that he was helping to erect. The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.

What he had not foreseen about Miami, though, was the plethora of stories like his. He had also not realized that there would be homeless families sleeping under a bridge a few feet from the luxury hotel that he was helping to erect. The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.

We can't rewalk the exact footprints we make in the stories of our lives but we'll hear again our footprints like the lullabies our parents sang us the moment our stories end Perhaps out of our footprints our children will nurse wiser lullabies

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.

God impresses His writers to speak to our needs, to tell us of sin when we need a message of judgment, and to tell us of hope when our hearts are weary. The Old Testament stories are much more than simply stories. They are powerful sermons driven by the conviction that God is Master of the universe and Lord of our lives.

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

Somethings were meant to be and somethings were just meant to be good stories

The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

When writers in New York complained they could not write after 9/11, it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would tell about the life they would no longer have among us - waiting to see if it was worth it.

What would you read to someone who was dying?" Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

I would have thought it was the sort of house a vampire lived in if I hadn't been aware that vampire stories were superstitious legends designed to subjugate the enslaved rural classes into unquestioning obedience of feudal autocracy.

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.

Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.