Quotes About Stories

Sometimes, the lascars would gather between the bows to listen to the stories of the greybeards. There was the steward, Cornelius Pinto: a grey-haired Catholic, from Goa, he claimed to have been around the world twice, sailing in every kind of ship, with every kind of sailor - including Finns, who were known to be the warlocks and wizards of the sea, capable of conjuring up winds with a whistle.

For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories — of a kind.

Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a God-fearing man: in Hebrew, fear and faith are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of God is portrayed as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him.

Moreover, what purpose, if any, is served by your stories? Whom do they benefit?

No one tells me better stories, he assured me. I was aware of the point at which a compliment becomes a trap, because you are expected to keep doing the thing you are praised for; resentment will follow when you stop.

We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.

If you have a seriousness of purpose, which is to understand yourself, human nature, the world, and the conflicts that make us infinitely interesting, you will find the stories that you want o tell.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

I don't know, but it is a me that is absolutely trusting, naif, child-like, and that me accepts all the stories, all the lies, all the treachery.

having faith that their life together, their adventures together, and the stories that they told each other, would soon take the place of the wine, believing that all the natural intoxications of caress would flow from her and not the barrel.

I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets. In every face.

Take the Gospel parables: what are these stories, these narratives, if not powerful invitations to people to locate themselves within the situations of others, precisely in order to realize the moral landscapes of their life, so that they may develop their spiritual, empathetic and imaginative view of reality?

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.

Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over

There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it

If you're like most of our readers, you're probably wondering where we get all the ideas for our books from. Well, sometimes we think them up. Other times they are based on stuff that actually happens. Like this book, for instance. It all started one morning when I got up and went down to get some breakfast.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

I think of us humans as a family of amnesia victims who kept making up stories about our past until we found a means to reconstruct it—the sciences.

All of a sudden the world opened up and it's doing it again now. In this garden there are so many stories, so many other problems besides mine.

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles.

Stories...told with...heroes at the centre of them...are told to laud the virtues of the heroes---for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way the hero can't, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally about God.

Stories were a living thing. They changed to suit the teller or the times.

Quilts are like lives. They're made up of a lot of little pieces," Nit said.

She was an original ... She was an eccentric. She'd come alive like a fire, telling funny stories and entertaining everyone, then she'd suddenly run out of fuel, make her excuses and leave. You always knew when she'd had enough. Those that didn't would find themselves talk to the walls.