Stories
Quotes - All we have is the story we tell
“You
will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but
for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.”
―
Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story
“I
like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose
between the two?”
―
David Byrne, How Music Works
“Elinor
had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point
because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea,
but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those
wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of
unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed
their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from
books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by
closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real
conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the
pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.”
―
Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
“When
I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with
me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her
name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later,
when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone
and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would
write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about
herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go
on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the
happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to
say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.”
―
Roman Payne
“Those
around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and
coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly
mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into
misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will
craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story
will be the one to last.”
―
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
“All
we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our
strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of
it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our
goddamned story!”
―
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
“All
stories are lies. But good stories are lies made from light and fire. And they
lift our hearts out of the dust, and out of the grave.”
―
Mike Carey, Lucifer, Vol. 11: Evensong
“All
the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it
seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at
my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am
beautiful.”
―
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“There's
magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be
different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the
mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in
someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move
them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of
your words. That is your role, your gift.”
―
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
“Stories
were immutable. And what was a library but a house full of stories?”
―
Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent
“People
need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real.”
―
Brandon Sanderson, Skyward
“Endings
to be useful must be inconclusive.”
―
Samuel R. Delaney
“Killing
animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.”
―
Jess C. Scott, Skins, Animal Stories
“I'm
skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath
the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark
and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's
life with a story.”
―
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
“History,
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
doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is
to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.”
―
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
“Well,
it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books
that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be.
With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's
been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second
kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful
and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.”
―
Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
“People
are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows
something interesting, something that can make your life richer.”
―
Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Small and Simple Things
“In
fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to
understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to
represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the
human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of
being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters
originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed
to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the
moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the
world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the
moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more
sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started
not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real
enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism,
murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt,
the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves,
vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to
help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”
―
Guillermo del Toro
