Popular quotes about Stories! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its formsโof life, of love, of knowledgeโhas traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.
Jasper FfordeWe're looking for stories that speak to us. We're looking for stories that connect us with something true. But, instead, a lot of the time we get strippers. All I'm saying is, when boys are writing the stories, the percentage of strippers is bound to go up. And real stories about real women kinda don't get written at all.
Katherine CenterJust recognizing and naming that many of the things we treat as historical fact are stories can help erode their power over our sense of identity and thinking. If they are stories rather than "truth," we can write new stories that better represent the country we aspire to be. Our new stories can be about diverse people working together to overcome challenges and make life better for all, about figuring out how to live sustainably on this one planet we share, and on deep respect for cooperation, fairness, and equity instead of promoting hyper-competitive individualism.
Annie LeonardI dreamed of being a part of the storiesโeven terrifying one, even horror storiesโbecause at least the girls in stories were alive before they died.
Francesca Lia BlockThere are tons of stories out there. I read a lot of scripts on a weekly basis. I'm looking for stories to tell and stories that I hope will be interesting to an audience.
Samuel L. JacksonI never have people tell me their stories. I usually have to figure them out myself. Because I know that if people tell me stories, they will expect them to be remembered. And I cannot guarantee that. There is no way to know if the stories stay after I'm gone. And how devastating would it be to confide in someone and have the confidence disappear? I don't want to be responsible for that.
David LevithanSo much of the knowledge in our minds is based on lies and superstitions that come from thousands of years ago. Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories.
Miguel Angel RuizThe secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably... in the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
Arundhati RoyWriting stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.
David SmallThis kingdom of God life is not a matter of waking up each morning with a list of chores or an agenda to be tended to, left on our bedside table by the Holy Spirit for us while we slept. We wake up already immersed in a large story of creation and covenant, of Israel and Jesus, the story of Jesus and the stories that Jesus told. We let ourselves be formed by these formative stories, and especially as we listen to the stories that Jesus tells, get a feel for the way he does it, the way he talks, the way he treats people, the Jesus way.
Eugene H. PetersonEvery woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair. The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people's hearts.
Karen WhiteThe earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
Robert CormierThere are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.
Neil GaimanIf time was a string connecting all of your stories, that party would be the point where everything knots up. And that knot keeps growing and growing, getting more and more tangled, dragging the rest of your stories into it.
Jay AsherMy mother was a children's librarian. I remember when traditional stories were revised for modern audiences until they bore only a nodding acquaintance with the originals, but were released as 'authentic Indian stories' when they were, in fact, nothing of the kind.
Patricia BriggsMemory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.
Rabih AlameddineI probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories.
Jim DavisEverything we know has come from stories that have been told over and over again as truth. Those stories turn into history.
Oliver JeffersI constantly think as an artist, as a rapper of what are the stories you want to tell? They can't all be, "I'm ill, I'm fresh, look at me, I have money." At some point, when you have an audience for it, there are stories that need to be told.
Himanshu SuriThere is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories are so illuminating that they must be engraved and encased in gold and put in the palace library, the people who compile the book are telling us that this is a collection of human wisdom.
Marina WarnerCanadians are fond of darker stories, serious stories, so if you're a Mystery writer or a Romance writer or Fantasy Writer, you will most likely have an American publisher and agent.
Eden RobinsonSamurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
Roger EbertI am drawn to Americana, and I am drawn to gothic stories, and I love American gothic stories.
Roberto Aguirre-SacasaI love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.
Colum McCannOne of the remarkable qualities of the story is that it creates space. We can dwell in a story, walk around, find our own place. The story confronts but does not oppress; the story inspires but does not manipulate. The story invites us to an encounter, a dialogue, a mutual sharing. As long as we have stories to tell to each other there is hope. As long as we can remind each other of the lives of men and women in whom the love of God becomes manifest, there is reason to move forward to new land in which new stories are hidden.
Henri NouwenAs a kid, I was always the jokester. I was telling stories at dinner and trying to make people laugh. I guess I've always just been naturally inclined to tell stories.
Wyck GodfreyThere are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre BretonHistory, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesnโt make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesnโt fit. And often that is quite a lot.
Paul MurrayI grew up listening to my grandfather's stories of our musical past. He would often talk about the orchestras that played at concerts and the musicians who played on Sunday evenings on street corners. By the time I grew up in the '80s, all of this was a thing of the past. I lived vicariously through his stories and often wondered what it would have felt like to have been part of his generation.
Sharmeen Obaid-ChinoyYou've read newspaper stories about elderly widows who die and leave their entire estates to their pet cats, right? Well, your cat reads those stories too, and has spent most of its skulking, devious little life dreaming about inheriting all your money.
Dave BarryWe try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.
Charlie KaufmanI didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
Denis JohnsonAll we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.
Nora Raleigh BaskinI think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.
Donald Miller"Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.
Patrick NessA lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.
Stan SakaiEverybody loves vampire stories, and if there's one show in particular that's done really well, it just opens the door and the opportunity for more of those kind of stories to get through.
Madchen AmickWhat I like about the '60s movies was that they were about women. They were telling women's stories. I think a lot of movies don't tell women's stories anymore.
Anna BillerI'm a cinephile. I love movies, I love film at every level. I'm a student of it. It informs me as does all art in my music, because there's stories, there's acts, there's moods, there's dynamics, there's moodiness, emotion. All of those things that play into a film. I think that could equally be said about music. It definitely informs me. Beats is stories.
Q-TipHow can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Douglas CouplandI love stories and acting is a way to tell stories. Everyone assumes I've done it my whole life.
Cody HornEver since I can remember, I've always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.
Rob ThomasA good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.
Tim O'BrienWe are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.
Arthur Kleinman