Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

Perhaps we shouldn't be displeased with the 'environmental ethics' we have or the 'business ethics' or the 'political ethics' or any of the myriad of other codes of conduct suggested by our actions. After all, we've created them. We've created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn't come out of nowhere. They didn't arrive from another planet.

Perspective is the key to everything.

Poetry has a long, long memory. After our love is long gone, we will still be reading your poems. You will not be the only one whose heart this breaks. Know that we will stand , reading the words written about our love – and we will ache for you The body will remember the way you shifted and sighed as skin met skin and those words will pay tribute to the lines that were composed while we moved through this world together. Because of this, we will never truly forget you. Let us remember.

Poetry is, after all, only nonsense and justifies what would be considered impudence if written in prose.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.

Poppy’s hands fall on to the book. ‘Stories’, she says, ‘are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

Positive thoughts shape a positive world.

Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.

Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.

Prior to the invention of writing, stories were confined by the limited capacity of human brains. You couldn’t invent overly complex stories which people couldn’t remember. With writing you could suddenly create extremely long and intricate stories, which were stored on tablets and papyri rather than in human heads. No ancient Egyptian remembered all of pharaoh’s lands, taxes and tithes; Elvis Presley never even read all the contracts signed in his name; no living soul is familiar with all the laws and regulations of the European Union; and no banker or CIA agent tracks down every dollar in the world. Yet all of these minutiae are written somewhere, and the assemblage of relevant documents defines the identity and power of pharaoh, Elvis, the EU and the dollar. Writing has thus enabled humans to organise entire societies in an algorithmic fashion. We encountered the term ‘algorithm’ when we tried to understand what emotions are and how brains function, and defined it as a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. In illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organised into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.

Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore...

Pour your heart onto the page.

Puppets do not have thoughts, they are more like our thoughts, images of our thoughts, as if our minds were populated with remnants of the older, more cliched stories that we manipulate and that manipulate us.

Reading your work out loud to yourself it's good. It helps even more if you read to people. If they start yawning that is a bad sign. Unless you are writing for children. Then your story is not bad, if you just wrote a bedtime story!

Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.

Real inspiration are not people, but their stories.

Reasons were invented, and stories were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read. Fragments were true but we needed stories greater than fragments. We needed stories in order to imagine the mad world we lived in.

Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

Remember, how you choose to see yourself, your surroundings, and your situation is something you have agency over. You don’t have to accept a story as gospel or dogma.

Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.

Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman. After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof. "A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")

Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you loved him until it was already too late. What was he to you? A friend? A lover? Or was he just some set piece in Rob Sardan’s great story? Is that what everyone is to you? Can’t we have our own story?

Rocks and minerals: the oldest storytellers.

Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.

Run your purpose on the toes of your feet before people can type your success stories with the fingers of their hands.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

Screw chocolate. A good steak is where it’s at.

Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters

See the truth. Feel the truth. Be the truth.

She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: "Once upon a time." An incantation.

She could sense the approach of land- taste when the waters changed, feel when currents turned cool or warm- but it didn't hurt to keep an eye on the shore now and then, and an ear out for boats. The slap of oars could be heard for leagues. Her father had told tales about armored seafarers in days long past, whose trireme ships had three banks of rowers to ply the waters- you could hear them clear down to Atlantica, he'd say. Any louder and they would disrupt the songs of the half-people- the dolphins and whales who used their voices to navigate the waters. Even before her father had enacted the ban on going to the surface, it was rare that a boat would encounter a mer. If the captain kept to the old ways, he would either carefully steer away or throw her a tribute: fruit of the land, the apples and grapes merfolk treasured more than treasure. In return the mermaid might present him with fruit of the sea- gems, or a comb from her hair. But there was always the chance of an unscrupulous crew, and nets, and the potential prize of a mermaid wife or trophy to present the king. (Considering some of the nets that merfolk had found and freed their underwater brethren from, it was quite understandable that Triton believed humans might eat anything they found in the sea- including merfolk.)

She didn't look up, her gaze focused entirely on the paper before her as she drew what looked like a wing. He picked up one of the papers from the floor, and on it was a butterfly, the colors a blending of vibrant yellows and oranges. He held out the paper. "What's this one called?" "Golden Shimmer," she said. "She loves the sunlight." He picked up a picture of a light-purple butterfly with a string of pearls around her neck. "And this one?" "Lavender Lace. She has the power to heal all sorts of wounds." He scanned the room, all the pictures on the floor. "Do they each have a name?" Finally she looked at him, her bright-blue eyes meeting his. "Of course." And he realized with a pang of sadness that these were Libby's friends for life. "They are beautiful." A glint of a smile. "Thank you." He picked up another butterfly, this one a dark violet shade, a silver streak bleeding across the edge of its wings. "What is she called?" "Silver Shadow." "Does she have a story?" Libby's smile faded. "She's lost and can't seem to find her way home.

She had forced herself to learn to read – picked up bits and pieces, here and there, from the very few teachers who had been patient with her; from looking at words while out and about; from television, and from friends. And to avoid the shouting and drug-induced moaning, and the row of male visitors her mum would entertain, she would barricade herself in her room – there'd been no lock – and lose herself in books.

She is a figure of legend and fairy tale, one to be taken seriously, or she might knock you off your feet with a quick whirl of the staff she carries everywhere.

She reminded me that I could write stories,/ could be struck by lightning & live.

She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.

She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...

Readers can surprise you. Many times, they notice layers in your stories, that even you were not aware of while writing.

Reading is like riding through a tunnel and coming out with a new landscape...

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences.

She tried to slip out of his embrace without waking him up, but she felt him stir as she moved his hand. She turned to look at him and saw that he was wide awake, staring at her. Without saying a word, he pulled her closer and kissed her on the mouth. Her first morning kiss! She had always wondered how couples could kiss with a night-long breath, without rinsing their mouth. It had always disgusted her. But, now, as he kissed her on the mouth and she opened her mouth to welcome his tongue, she felt a deep connection with him. As if he was sharing a part of his soul through the morning kiss. - Story 106 of You Me & Stories

She wanted to and believed she could —so she did.

Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.

Soll ich dir eine Geschichte erzählen? Nein. Warum nicht? Der Junge sah ihn an und wandte den Blick ab. Warum nicht? Diese Geschichten sind nicht wahr. Das müssen sie auch nicht sein. Es sind Geschichten. Ja. Aber in den Geschichten helfen wir andauernd jemanden, dabei tun wir das in Wirklichkeit gar nicht. Warum erzählst du mir nicht eine Geschichte? Ich will nicht. Okay. Ich habe keine Geschichten zu erzählen. Du könntest mir eine Geschichte über dich selbst erzählen. Die Geschichten über mich kennst du alle. Du warst dabei. Du hast Geschichten in deinem Inneren, von denen ich nichts weiß. Du meinst, so was wie Träume? Ja. Oder einfach Sachen, über die du nachdenkst. Ja, aber Geschichten sollen doch schön sein. Nicht unbedingt. Du erzählst immer schöne Geschichten. Kennst du denn keine schönen? Meine haben mehr mit dem wirklichen Leben zu tun. Und meine nicht? Deine nicht. Nein. Der Mann betrachtete ihn. Und das wirkliche Leben ist ziemlich übel? Was denkst du denn? Tja, ich denke, es gibt uns noch. Es sind viele schlimme Sachen passiert, aber es gibt uns immer noch. Ja. Du findest das nicht so toll. Es ist okay.

Sikander was right—they were just stories, and stories couldn’t save people. 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?