Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

Surround yourself with those conducive to you being your highest self.

Take a deep breath. Inhale peace. Exhale happiness.

Take me back into the time when I lost track of time!

Talent and work ethic are nothing without belief.

Tales are slippery, her mother had often said. The truth of a story depends on who is telling it.

Tales are as much the necessary fabric of our lives as our bodies are.

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

Tell a story in fewer and simpler words.

Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is.

That is the problem with stories, child. The truth in them cannot be weighed.

That is the difference between you and me. You had only one story to tell.' She stops and grins once more. 'I have millions.

That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. With hindsight, going on crusade in the hope of reaching Paradise sounds like utter madness. With hindsight, the Cold War seems even madder. How come thirty years ago people were willing to risk nuclear holocaust because of their belief in a communist paradise? A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants.

That's very important about stories. They touch something that is human in us and is probably unchanging. Perhaps this is why the important knowledge is passed through stories. It's what holds a culture together. Culture has a story, and every person in it participates in that story. They world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts.

That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me.

That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

The African continent has so many stories to tell, it's about time they are told, by them - not us.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.