Stories Quotes

“I don't have much time for stories," Vin said.

"Seems that fewer and fewer people do, these days." A canopy kept off the ash, but he seemed unconcerned about the mists. "It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all such a fetish for it. It's not a very nice place these days.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“People who understand everything get no stories.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Do you know how many grand romances would have avoided tragedy if the hero had thought, "You know, maybe I should ask her if she likes me first"?”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”
― John Berger, Once in Europa

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, Merlin

“We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to.

We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers.

And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own.

If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us.

We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special.

We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread.

We have friends who lend us their favorite books.

Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears.

All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes.

Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.”
― Lois Lowry

“But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett

“How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be important?
But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper.
It was all about words.
If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.”
― Linda Sue Park, When My Name Was Keoko

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”
― Clark Zlotchew, Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties

“Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“Then a person has only one tale?”

No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.”
― Chris Wooding, Poison

“I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.”
― Andrew Clements, Things Hoped For

“Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as seperate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming.
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction -don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. (p.87)”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

“Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?”
― Julianna Baggott, Pure

“It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.”
― Katherine Hannigan, Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World

“Why write stories? To join the conversation.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose....it made the stories look on the surface like 'a mere bubble of nonsense' within which it was possible to 'utter harsh truths, to say what you dare' about the state of women's lives. Because they were just stories, right? Harmless little fantasies?”
― Christine Heppermann, Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty

“I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.”
― William Golding

“Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways

“Don’t you ever feel
like you’re just
a story someone is telling
about someone like you?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, What the Dragon Said: A Love Story

“These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war.

Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.

All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

“Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality
happens only once.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“It doesn’t have to end, does it?”
“I hope it never ends.”
― Cassia Leo, The Way We Fall