Quotes About Stories

La cuestión es que mi cabeza, como la de los niños, va inventando historias todo el rato. No lo hago a propósito, no es una decisión voluntaria: simplemente la imaginación se enciende por sí sola.

El mundo estaba lleno de historias tártaras, de realidades atroces y dolientes, de horrores tan redondos y completos que no nos cabían dentro de la cabeza. Porque los infiernos que podemos imaginar son siempre menos crueles que los auténticos.

Gustav waited. He wondered whether he wanted to know the thing she was about to tell him, or whether it wasn't better for certain knowledge to remain hidden, so that the mind could conjure its own stories from out of the past, stories it could bear to live with, stories which, in time, took on their own reality and seemed to become true.

What I have learned as a writer is that people love being asked about their stories.

You hear diffrent things in all them way back storys but it dont make no diffrents, Mostly they aint strait storys any how. What they are is diffrent ways of telling what happent.

Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.

Because in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born.

That's what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we're able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too

Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.' A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too." I wondered if the Aleph was in his poem, or if I was. That would be weird, to be in someone else's poem, or someone else's book.

But what a sweet story it is! And in the end, to us, that's what really matters. That's what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we're able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

As slaves to your obsessions, we know what it feels like to be impressed and bound. But at the same time we understand that thoughts like these are just idle tropes, fantasies we spin to while away the hours. Fantasies, being something that we books excel at. The real stories—the ones that happen—belong to you.

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is. — But, Dr Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal. 18 —

I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You'll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...

Khattam-Shud,' he Said slowly 'is the arch-enemy of all stories, even of language itself. He is the prince of silence and the foe of speech. And because everything ends, because dreams ens, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. 'It is finished,' we tell one another, 'it's over, Khattam-Shud; the end.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.