Quotes About Stories

The goal of using stories isn't to write better stories. The goal of product development isn't to make products.

Stories aren't a written form of requirements; telling stories through collaboration with words and pictures is a mechanism that builds shared understanding. Stories aren't the requirements; they're discussions about solving problems for our organization, our customers, and our users that lead to agreements on what to build. Your job isn't to build more software faster: it's to maximize the outcome and impact you get from what you choose to build.

If you're not getting together to have rich discussions about your stories, then you're not really using stories.

the real value of stories isn't what's written down on the card. It comes from what we learn when we tell the story.

If your goal in reading this book is to learn to write better stories, you've got the wrong goal.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

My mind made them into insects, because my mind wanted stories it could understand, stories that would not frighten it. But still I knew my mind was tricking me, and for a second I loved my mind for the deception.

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow.

Then he asked me to tell him some stories about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That's when I realized that I am not Ketut Liyer's English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man- I am his company. I'm somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn't had much of a chance to see it.

I learned that not only does everybody have a story that would stop your heart, but everybody wants to tell you about it.

Anyway, I quite liked the way he lived inside my imagination as a massive and powerful presence, built out of his poems and the stories I'd heard about him. So I decided to know him only that way—through my imagination. And that's where he remains for me to this day: still alive inside me, completely internalized, almost as though I dreamed him up.

At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.

Slaveowners in America were torturing the Africans they enslaved for reading, but the British had discovered the hard way of truth of the maxim - Nature abhors a vacuum. Fill their minds with your stories and they will adore you; leave their minds free to roam and they will hatch plans to destroy you (181).

The invention of languages is the foundation.The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows

The invention of languages is the foundation.The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows' (Letters, 165, p. 219).

All these lives, she said. All the stories we never know. (125)