Quotes About Stories

It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.

Every newspaper report of Virginia's action made events in Virginia sound more extravagant than they were. The Burgesses had passed four resolves; Maryland printed six and Rhode Island seven; undoubtedly stories relayed in private letters, by word of mouth, the gossip of taverns, parishes, towns, and court meetings introduced further distortions. Henry's bravado was reported in these stories; his backing down was not.

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

Instead of a fogged understanding, Austin suggests, we can attain greater insight into the mystery of our being – can, in fact, through the imaginative stories we tell ourselves, actuate increasingly improved contingent versions of human reality.

Although the Koran seethes with unrelenting hostility toward the Jews, it's clear from the Koran's many Biblically derived stories that Judaism greatly influenced Islamic theology. The story of Noah's ark appears in sura 10; Jonah and his whale in sura 37. The patriarch Abraham appears in many suras. And as we shall see, Moses figures prominently throughout the Koran, with his confrontation with Pharaoh retold numerous times.

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.

The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.

No, I'm just a poet," said San Epifanio, making room for me. "Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories.

A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories.

La letteratura è una somma di vite: vissute e non vissute.

When a movie or TV show is too heavily larded with these moments, you may be looking at the result of interference from producers and executives. They've trained themselves to see stories as connective tissues fusing together various categories of gratification. This is why so many would-be blockbusters play more like hodge-podges of disparate stimuli than satisfyingly integrated narratives.

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that God is a very creative author, and He writes a different story for every person. No two lives or stories alike.

Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.

So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.

The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.

We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.

One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.

The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability. They are found in Native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practices, but most of all in stories, the ones that are told to help restore balance, to locate ourselves once again in the circle.

What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.

What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again." So now my house is spangled with Post-it notes in another language, as if I were studying for a trip abroad. But I'm not going away, I'm coming home.