Stories Quotes

“People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."

[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]”
― T.C. Boyle

“These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.”
― John Verdon, Shut Your Eyes Tight

“Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.”
― A.D. Posey

“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

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

“As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.”
― Nenia Campbell, Evergloom

“We forget that the sweetest joys are found in the simplest acts: hugs, laughter, quiet observation, basic movements, holding hands, pleasant music, shared stories, a listening ear, an unhurried visit, and selfless service. It is sad we forget a truth so elementary.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.
Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.”
― Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams

“Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Literature is the real life of imaginary people.”
― Stefanos Livos

“Without a best friend to tell stories to, it almost didn't matter if they even happened.”
― Leila Howland, Nantucket Blue

“-Dream up something wild and improbable. Something beautiful and full of monsters.

-Beautiful and full of monsters?

-All the best stories are.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which he had been forever displaced, they exiled his body but his spirit, never. And maybe now every place was becoming that place, maybe Lebanon was everywhere and nowhere, so that we were all exiles, even if our hair wasn't so wavy, our smiles not so naughty, our minds less beautiful, even the name Lebanon wasn't necessary, the name of every place or any place would do just as well, maybe that's why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“I prefer a story to a prayer.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I wanted to know what our family's stories were.
I wanted to know the things Mom wouldn't think to tell me. Things she knew but never said out loud, because they were a part of her.
I wanted to know what made the Bahrami family special.”
― Adib Khorram, Darius the Great Is Not Okay

“This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.”
― Ben Okri

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets.
In every face.”
― Andrew Clements, Things Hoped For

“For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.”
― Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

“The way stories change us can't be explained,' Padraig says. 'It can only be felt. Like love.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“It's one of the greatest gifts you can give someone, knowing their stories.”
― Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us

“Stories are the wealth of humanity!”
― Pierce Brown, Iron Gold