Quotes About Story

The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves

I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.

Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future? Can a nation of immigrants once again follow her example to become native, to make a home?

The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.

And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.

He has dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and battered features. His nose has definitely been broken, probably a couple of times, and he's missing a piece of his ear, as if someone took a bite out of it. There's a story there, no doubt. I like that about his face. That it's a road map of been there, done that. It's interesting.

I have a whole life to tell; I have nothing left to lose and few to offend.

As A-ma said, every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence after another.

When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.

The girl with the pictures on her skin

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

Eloise thought that justice was a funny thing. It was a big idea, a romantic one. It was imagined like a satisfying end to a story.

Good, according to Stella, with the books. He was well-read. He hand-sold, getting to know patrons and recommending books they might like. He's a throwback, said Stella. A real bookseller, in an industry that had stopped caring about story and only cared about numbers.

We're dead far longer than we're alive. Why not celebrate? Why not tell ourselves a story about what comes next?

Story is life, Miss Graves," he said. She'd heard him say that a million times. She finally understood what he meant.

Story is story, Stella said. It's a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.

We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.

In every life story, including our own, decisions are made in haste that determine the course of eternity.

Well, the old Autumn didn't know anything about reality. The old Autumn was quite happy living in a childish make-believe world where bad things didn't happen and where you could make up whatever silly story you liked and tell yourself it was true.

Her name was Rosemary, The Giver said.

She turned her eyes away quickly so that she would not learn it, would not be guilty of something clearly forbidden to her. But it made her smile, to see it, to see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name.

She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold.

We may never know the true story behind the book, but the book has become a myth, and myth is truer than history.