Quotes About Stories

With her final poem, "Bless This Land," she declared: "Luminous forests, oceans, and rock cliff sold for the trash glut of gold, uranium, or oil bust rush yet there are new stories to be made, little ones coming up over the horizon." Harjo did this revolutionary thing under the great greened dome of the Library of Congress

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory

Despite my dad's assurances I was strangely nervous my stomach tight ever since we'd hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this and it was why she'd pretty much talked nonstop since I'd approached her and asked for a ride. I'd barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened But People Were Okay in the End.

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.

Some people read palms to tell your future, I read hands to tell your past. Each scar marks a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle, is a broken bottle, a missed punch, a rusty nail, years in a factory.

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories.

I know how long—endless—people's stories are when they have grievances. And how tedious for everyone.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there'd be no stories. If there were no stories, there'd be no language. If there was no language there'd be no . . . What?

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

But I read so seldom, that I prefer books suited exactly to my taste. And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life, - and the friends who are about me, whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence,- which, without being absolutely paradise, is, on the whole, a source of indescribable happiness.

Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.

Stories to read are delitabill (delightful) Suppose that they be nocht but fable (fiction) Then should stories that suthfast were (truthful) - And they were said in good manner - Have double pleasure in hearing. The first pleasance is the carping (reading aloud) And the tothir the suthfastness That shows the thing richt as it was;

I looked at the people playing, walking, loafing, hurrying, or sauntering across the little park in front of us. How many terrible stories were there, just there in front of me, never to be spoken?

full of stories about the old man's exploits. As for the house at 100 High Street, it was

I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

David's mother would often tell him stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way people were alive,or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them...

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours.

Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.