Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

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.)

Oggi quei giorni sembrano ingenui e lontani. In metropolitana non si leggono più i manga, come una volta, i giapponesi sono assorbiti da altre letture, e smartphone e tablet hanno sostituito la carta. Eppure… eppure resterà immutata la necessità di storie, di visoni. Cosa cerchiamo in un racconto? Una coperta di Linus che ci riscaldi durante il nostro viaggio. […] Abbiamo bisogno di storie, per affrontare la vita, il dolore. Per curarci.

Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man's mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the new-born world! It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same; and still our own bitter experience and heart-breaking regrets teach us to sympathize too feelingly with a tale like this.

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

O Heavenly Children, the stories you have concocted in God's name have angered Him; for he would never instigate war between brothers, or encourage tribes to harbor resentment towards one another. He prefers the man who loves over the one who hates. And the man who spreads kindness, peace and knowledge, over the one who spreads lies, fear and terror — and misuses His name.

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

On a cloudy day, when the dim dance of the firelight and the warmth of the sconces are not enough, the books shed their own form of light. By the hundreds, they fill the shelves that stretch across every inch of exposed wall. They rise up to the ceiling, warriors of an impenetrable army, encircling my over-sized armchair and keeping me safe as they whisper their stories softly in my ear.

Once you tell somebody a story, you are all in the same world and you can all speak to each other about the same things and understand the same things.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

One may learn a great deal of a people by the stories they tell of others.

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

One day, you muster the courage and let go of the fear. In a brief moment of insanity, you give wings to the stories you had wanted to tell; some you didn't even know were in you. In that instant, something about you changes. You are born again.

[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr] [Niels] Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately, humankind in general, are common traits of the Jewish intellectual. So too is a well-fortified atheism. Bohr ended with no religious belief and a dislike of all religions that claimed to base their teachings on revelations.

One word absent from a sentence, or misinterpreted incorrectly, can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One word can change the meaning of everything. Before you believe anything about God or anybody, ask yourself how well do you trust the transmitter, translator or interpreter. And if you have never met them, then how do you know if the knowledge you acquired is even right? One hundred and twenty-five years following every major event in history, all remaining witnesses will have died. How well do you trust the man who has stored his version of a story? And how can you put that much faith into someone you don't know?

Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable...

Only by creating out of love will one achieve true greatness.

Only stories and magic really endure.

Our days will pass in singing songs. We will roam the jungles and I will teach you the language of all animals. You will fear them no more and will pick flowers instead after you have tired of gazing at the beauty that would surround us. During the day I will turn the wheel and make pots and you will string flowers together and make garlands for gods and men. We will sell them at the temple in the evening and by nights you will cradle in my arms and listen to a new story every night before shutting your eyes to the long beautiful day. And when all my stories are exhausted we will together make new ones. This is the way queens must live

Our brains hold the magic that allows us to find our stories and to make and remake our meaning.

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Our eventual fate will be the sum of the stories we told ourselves long enough.

o There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

Our future depends on stories. As the world advances, literature has the ability to ground us—in our humanness, our imaginations, and our enlightenment.

Our life-defining stories matter. We need to find them and tell them -- or write them.

Our stories have already been written only we are not the author. We have no way of knowing what is coming or even how our final chapter will end. We handle our storylines the best way we know how as they present themselves. All we can do is try to leave our marks along the way, our legacy.

Our stories make us who we are. And each story has its own purpose and its own reward. Each story rings true and each story is worthy of the ages. There is no such thing as an insignificant life.

Our stories must be written, shared and communicated.

oYu begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.

path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you're going on it is only a story. Where you've been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant ones; some are not. That's dark and light.

People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

People don’t remember lessons. They remember stories.

People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.