Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

Love is the answer.

Love is the key to everything. Love your life.

Love that Literature.

Love writes without words.

Love your story.

Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.

Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking--only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.

Magic is the most interesting art because people not necessarily want to learn to paint after they see a great painting, but they want to learn magic after they see a great magic effect.

Magic is a very beautiful mystery. Even the ages old magic effects still surprises the most modern men.

Magician is the best storyteller in the world.

Magicians and Mentalist predict the future because they create it.

Many writers were better before they became famous.

Many stories begin with a dream, but it is rare when the dream is the story itself.

Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting.

Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

Maybe that's what writers do- Maybe they exaggerate pain just so that you feel okay about what you're feeling.

Memories that have never been told aren't yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon's monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the "I" addressing a "you," because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener.

Maybe those stories did more harm than good by giving us false hope. All they did was reinforce our faith that the world was once made up almost entirely of magic or miracles. But where was that magic now, when we needed it?

Maybe we're just falling stars, we once danced in the same skyline looking down at the world. And we've fallen like all others, from near and far, we've gathered together, but separated by time and space, keeping a part of that light that we've came with and spreading it in this dark world that we've chosen to live in, in order to shine some light and love around. Maybe we've chosen to believe one truth today, and find it to be false tomorrow. Maybe we're trying to not get attached to the idea that we now know it all. At night, we see the truth of where we've fallen from, gazing in that night sky full of distant stars, constellations, planets, the reflection of the sun on the moon, all with their own stories to tell. Sometimes we wonder why would we leave such a mysterious place, with an infinite amount of stories and wonders. Maybe it's because as stars we could've only seen each other's light from afar, but here we can listen more carefully to each other's story, embrace each other and kiss, discover more and more of what can be seen when infinite star dust potential is put into one body and given freedom to walk the Earth and wander, love and enjoy every moment until coming back. Maybe in the morning, we'll only see one star shining up there and forget the others. Maybe that is also how life and death is, and the beauty of the sunrise and sunset that come in between, our childhood years and old years, when we reflect on the stars that we once were and that we will once again be. Maybe, just maybe.

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

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)

Moral stories are always imaginary , but these stories induce real moral values in a human society .

Most stories are not about people but about life, an addiction like the rest of them that destroys you even as you love it, but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

Mommy says, "Bedtime for You!" So Owl says a friendly "Hoo!

Music is not my life. My life is music.

My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.

My grandma loved to be on stage entertaining people.  She loves to make people smile and laugh.  She loves to brighten other people's day.  She often calls perfect strangers her angel, as a way of witnessing, but also to encourage and build their self-esteem.

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

MY LIFE MAY NOT BE A FAIRY TALE BUT IT'S A DAMN GOOD READ

My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family—that is the story that we all must tell.

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.

My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.

My pillowcases were totally full and the boots hanging around my neck added to the weight I was carrying, but I was determined to get my loot back to the house. Hiding what I couldn’t carry in a closet in the back of the office, I left with what I could carry, fully expecting to return for the rest later. The main roads were teeming with refugees and looters. Not wanting to be seen, I decided to use a little known path that ran around the back of the village. I reached a small stream and attempted to cross it by jumping from one stone to another. But with both hands full, I lost my balance and fell into the wet mud. Lying there totally exhausted and humiliated, I was close to tears. I simply couldn’t go on, when suddenly a hand took hold of my arm and pulled me up. I found myself looking into the stern face of a uniformed Home Guardsman. Holding me by my shoulders he instantly started to scold me for looting the foodstuff that was scattered in the mud. I knew that looters could be shot and my fear was that he would turn me over to the Moroccans for punishment. Luckily, he said that he didn’t want to single me out when everyone was doing the same thing. After telling him about my two small children, he told me to go home and look after them. I guess the Home Guard didn’t care who they answered to, Nazis or Moroccans, it was all the same to them! I guess that he was just doing his job.

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

Nobody’s story is written only by himself. In our story, we can always find the stories written by others!

Never take tiny dreams for granted. They contain giant success stories.

Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

No matter what your deconstructionist professors told you, there is such a thing as human nature. People know how people are. Human nature dictates that most of us will tend to follow the same steps and missteps when solving a large problem. Therefore, stories will feel more natural if heroes tend to follow those same steps and missteps.

No matter how "normal" people look, living "ordinary" lives, everyone has a story to tell. And may be, just like you, everyone else is a misfit too.

Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal... There are so many stories already in the world, and so many are splendid and great, that it is difficult to believe it can be worth the telling. But if only I can tell it under direction, it will carry at least one quality of clear, running water- sincerity.

No one could say the stories were useless for as the tongue clacked five or forty fingers stitched corn was grated from the husk pathwork was pieced or the darning was done... (from 'The Storyteller Poems')

Not every story is true. And sometimes the things that were wicked become the things that save us, and the things that were good doom us to misery and pain.

Nuryevet wasn't a real thing--it was a story that people told one another. An idea they constructed in fantasy and then in stone and mortar, in lines of ink in labyrinthine law books, in cities and roads. It was a map, if you will, drawn on a one-to-one scale and laid out over the whole landscape like so much smothering cloth. So when I say there was nothing in Nuryevet worth saving, that's what I mean: the story wasn't worth saving, and none of its monstrous whelps were either--the government, their methods, the idea that they could feed their poor to the story like cattle to a sea monster so the wealthy could eat its leavings.

Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.

...not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.

Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)