Stories
Quotes - Stories come alive in the telling
“This
is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a
lie right from the start!”
―
Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 01
“So
here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all
have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no
matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard
we’ve had to work to expel it –
–
we all get to dream.”
―
N.K. Jemisin
“The
possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many
journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows.
But
stories all...”
― William
Joyce, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King
“What
is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and
incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and
faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are
there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to
mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads
of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of
rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart
long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the
earth is only a little dust under our feet."
(A
Teller of Tales)”
―
W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
“Stories
come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair
of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no
existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to
fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an
instrument to bring their music into being. 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. They needed it. It was the reason they forced
themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”
―
John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
“Stories
are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal”
―
Howard Gardner
“Writers
are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have
happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure
when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”
―
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country
“A
city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many
stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new
again.”
―
Rasmenia Massoud, Broken Abroad
“Stories
are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have
such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything -- we need only
listen.”
―
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
“Maybe
instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny
vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant
superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why
no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is
try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all
the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever
might look like a letter, or even a whole word....”
―
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
“Stories
are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”
―
Finley Peter Dunne
“I’m
very interested in the emotional honesty of things, which at times looks kind
of ugly and at times looks scary and not polished, and so there were many times
when I would audition for something and I would come from, for me, a very
honest place, but it’s completely not what they’re looking for for that type of
material. But I was always very steadfast in what I was interested in, and I
felt like, I’m gonna tell the truth as best as I know it. And you eventually
start to understand that the projects find you that meet up with that. It takes
as long as it takes, and for me it took like 20 years, but I’m really glad. You
know, the jobs always ultimately end up going to the person who’s supposed to
tell that story, and those weren’t my stories to tell.”
―
Brie Larson
“Who
will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A
story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to
leave only the bones, which remain untold.”
―
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Stories
are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the
center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.”
―
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
“I
wish I’d paid better attention. I didn’t yet think of time as finite. I didn’t
fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I
had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of
my mind.”
―
Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow
“It
is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading
even then.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Do
stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my
skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the
strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me
also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself
through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form
of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live
compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to
truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid
myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”
―
Milan Kundera, The Joke
“She
read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the
page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste
bad, but she was still unhappy.”
―
Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
“I
always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their
tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that
at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”
―
Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
“But
stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You
try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still
there, though. "
"But
you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does."
"No,
that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me
sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the
heart.”
―
Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
