Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

The air in the black sedan was cold and stale, and annoyingly, the driver had engaged the child safety locks so I couldn't roll down the window.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy.

The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously – so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected. “They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!” Fleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns – they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. those things in there” – he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.

The book she held had collapsed against her chest, planted like a shield between her tender heart and all that discouraged and despaired.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

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.

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?

The dead no longer existed. Except in story. Some stories were modest in scale, existing in a single family or a small community of believers who whispered among themselves so their loved ones would not be forgotten. Others were so powerful they would transform the very fabric of the world.

The deaf carve poetry out of space with their hands. The blind absorb stories though their fingers. The Greeks grouped poetry with the healing arts of medicine under the aegis of Apollo.

The day your souls see their faces or smell their memories in someone else's stories, and doesn't bleed anymore. You know, you have healed.

The Filomela tale was one of Beatrice’s favorites. Thereus, King of Thrace, having won the hand of Filomela’s older sister Procne after routing the Barbarians at the gates of Athens, saw that his bride was lonely in her new home. Thinking to cheer her, Thereus brought Filomela to his court, but the young Filomela’s beauty clouded the king’s judgment. That’s always how it was told, the girl’s fault for being young. Possessed by uncontrollable lust, Thereus forced himself upon his sister-in-law. He then cut out her tongue, locked her in a dungeon, and told his wife her sister was dead.

The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.

The family historian must master the art of storytelling. What, after all, is truth without anecdote, history without events, explanation without narration--or yet life itself without a story? Stories are not just the wells from which we drink most deeply but at the same time the golden threads that hold and bind--Ariadne's precious string that leads us through the labyrinth that connects living present and the living past.

The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.

The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside. But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls. It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room. That’s when the stories can move in. They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer whom history has singled out for attention, but the majority of tales in the Cabinet des Fées were penned by women writers who ran and attended the leading salons: Marie–Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette Julie de Murat, Marie–Jeanne L'Héritier, and numerous others. These were educated women with an unusual degree of social and artistic independence, and within their use of the fairy tale form one can find distinctly subversive, even feminist subtext.

The flower doth not worry, and the tree doth not waver.

The gift of knowledge is empowering, but the gift of wisdom is life-changing.

The greatest occupation is the act of writing.

The greatest love stories go untold, don’t they?

The Great stories give us the hope and the courage to survive life.

The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we’ve reached full adulthood, I think, this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it’s a lie. Life’s changes come slowly…the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations.

The idea that a story or the mobilization of a bunch of stories is futile flies in the face of everything we now about the history of social movements in the United States. The Labor Movement, the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, the LGBT Movement, the movement to Occupy Wall Street--all of these social transformations & the legislation they inspired were sparked & carried on at particular moments by tales of unrest, resistance & desire that were somehow documented & shared widely.

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.

The real world. The very notion is absurd. Worlds and everything in them are made real by the stories that inhabit them.

The length of novels, poems and stories, is measured by the number of missing words; a thousand pages become one, one becomes a thousand.

The life of the spirit is enfold in great literature.

The landscape always changed, but the magic never did. The tales were told to children wrapped up in sheets, to frighten or to soothe, but those doing the telling didn't have to believe. Perhaps it was just as well that they didn't, for the stories got so much of it wrong. They always do. The legends told of dragons and faeries, of locked towers and imprisoned princesses, and this was true enough.

The life of each person can’t be understood in a snapshot, a resume, or a social media profile. We have to enter fully into the stories of each individual if we hope to know and love them as God does. He is the Author of every human life. And God is an author worth reading.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

The more lies you tell the more stories you have to remember.

The monster inside him was finally silent. The sword in his hand spoke a thousand stories, while hundreds of voices screamed feebly through the blood dripping from it. The blade of the sword shined like an evening sky and sang a tale of the darkest revenge.

The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you’ll have enough to light up a movie screen.

The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just don't have a happy ending.

The more bleach in the bedsheets, the greater Chastity's impulse to roll around in them. A party would be thrown, she decided, the kind that would tell a small story in the contents of the dustpan the next morning. Detached sequins and mint leaves muddled by high heels, shrimp tales mixed in with a few shards of broken glass, a crust of bread. She rolled in her bleached sheets until they wrapped around her like a storm, and she fell asleep in the eye of it.

The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.