Stories Quotes

“Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he, Dad?' 'Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that's saying a lot.' Frodo: [continue walking] You've left out one of the chief characters - Samwise the Brave. I want to hear more about Sam. [stops and turns to Sam] Frodo: Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam. Sam: Now Mr. Frodo, you shouldn't make fun; I was being serious. Frodo: So was I. [they continue to walk] Sam: Samwise the Brave...”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."

(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)”
― A.E. Housman, Selected Prose

“The secret to your purpose is to find what you feel is important, and not pursue what others would think is important. When you think highly of yourself, me thinking highly of you will never be enough!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”
― George Lucas

“When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“All 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 Baskin, Anything But Typical

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“If there is such a thing as a universal--and I wasn't ready to throw all of mine out the window--it's that there is power in a story. And if someone pays you such a kindness as to make up a tale so you'll enjoy a gingersnap, you go along with that story and enjoy every last bite.”
― Clare Vanderpool, Moon Over Manifest

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. ”
― Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe

“So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.”
― John Marsden, The Night Is for Hunting

“From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.”
― Brian Wicker

“Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another.”
― Dean F. Wilson

“You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“
Why would I do that?” Poison interjected.
Bear with me,” Fleet said patiently. “If you did, then the tale would take on a whole new light. Instead of being the journey of Poison from Gull to save her sister, it would be the terrible story of how a young girl became a cold-blooded killer. They way it would be written would be different. Do you see? Or you might die right now, and it would turn out that it wasn’t your tale all along it was Bram’s or Peppercorn’s, and you were just one of the sideline characters. The whole story has to be known before it can be recorded; otherwise it might suddenly change. That’s the beauty, Poison. You never know what’s going to happen next. When the tale is ended, then the writing will be visible to your eyes; until then it is unwritten.”
― Chris Wooding, Poison

“I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.”
― Elizabeth Wein, The Pearl Thief

“Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.

No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

That is why we invent stories, I said.

And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Stories are critical, Kirabo. The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.”
― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, A Girl Is a Body of Water

“Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.”
― Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

“Pull a thread in my story and feel the tremor half a world and two millenia away.”
― Daniel Taylor, Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories

“I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.”
― CK Webb, Suspense Magazine, January 2011

“The common thread from all those stories was that talking helped, and listening, and time. One day I would find my own place. I couldn't run there, though, because it didn't exist yet; I had to build it myself, out of forgiveness, truth, and terrifying gestures of friendship.”
― I.W. Gregorio, None of the Above

“Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Sitting there, in the coffee house, I saw so many stories behind the lips of people who had left them untold.”
― Lidia Longorio, Hey Humanity

“நெருப்பைவிட அதிகமாக சுடக்கூடியது கதை. நெருப்புக் கொண்டும் எரிக்கமுடியாதது கதை.”
― Su. Venkatesan, வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, முதல் தொகுதி

“Do you think we carry them with us?’’ I asked. ‘’All the stories of the past?”
― Moïra Fowley-Doyle, All the Bad Apples