Quotes About Stories

But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain's daughter who believed that people could fly.

I think of life as a book of stories, he goes on. You move through the stories and the characters change.

To hell with human beings. I'd always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.

She thought that some people were like stories rather than whole books—at least the ones you never saw again. With people like that, you never knew what the real ending was.

And yet, how much damage could one small book do? How powerful could it be? That was when Sally began to run, because she knew the answer. Words were everything, stories were more powerful than any weapon, books changed lives.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.

she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their traumas for popularity and booze.

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories

They'd been attacked by lions, stampeded by elephants, flooded out by rains, made war on by "natives." The tales they told were simply incredible. There they sat on a heavily antimacassared horsehair sofa, two prim and proper ladies in ruffles and lace, telling these stupendous stories over tea.

The voices of my friends at the Little School grew stronger in my memory. By publishing these stories I feel those voices will not pass unheard.

Authors Note: This is a sketchbook, a collection of my impressions of Iran and its people. For the most part, I have painted situations as they occurred, present voices as precisely as possible. At times, I have made collages of stories and faces, as often to protect the identities of people as to lend artistry to a scene. As is the case with many portraits, their truth is not in their detail, but their spirit.

A woman who loves books has a dreamer's soul, with each story she has read woven into her own.

Ugyanis írogatok olykor egy-egy elbeszélést. - Olykor elolvasok egyet-egyet. - Köszönöm. - Elbeszéléseket általában, nem az önét.

Aunt Fran lowered her voice. Her cold is just the start of a greater sickness. These 'stories,' as you call them, will only lead her to more pain. Fran, talk plain, will you? I'm talking about derangement. Don't be silly! She wispered. And deviant behaviours.

I remember certain group gatherings that are hard to get up and leave from. I remember alligators and quicksand in jungle movies. (Pretty scary.) I remember opening jars that nobody else could open. I remember making home-made ice cream. I remember that I liked store-bought ice cream better. I remember hospital supply story windows. I remember stories of what hot dogs are made of. I remember Davy Crockett hats. And Davy Crockett just about everything else.

Most of my favorite stories as a reader come in at this length. Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren't leisurely, meandering journeys. They're drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.

In stories told later, many boys would claim that the girls on Coffin Rock were decorated with chunks of raw turkey, soaked in poultry blood like the chick in fuckin' Carrie, but this was embellishment.

These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false…the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.

A book of stories isn't a novel and can't have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It's like a road trip. You're staying in a different inn every night:

I enjoy doing romantic stories. I've done a lot of them.

Stories end where conflicts are resolved. The only social event worth talking about is conflict.