Kendrick Lamar
Rapper, Songwriter
"If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name."
Stories quotes
Stories
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Philosopher, Writer, Composer
"There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened."
Kendrick Lamar
Rapper, Songwriter
"I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing."
Elif Safak
Author
"Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough."
Franz Kafka
Writer
"The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside stories — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Stories quotes (page 1 of 332)
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"If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all."
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"My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges."
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"That's the story of my life; I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop."
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"But how could you live and have no story to tell?"
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"Death steals everything except our stories."
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"Your body is the ground and metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopedia, your life story. Everything that happens to you is stored and reflected in your body. In the marriage of flesh and spirit divorce is impossible."
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"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
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"The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout."
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"If you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. If you want them to be really smart, tell them more stories. If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them even more stories."
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"There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories."
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"I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium."
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"I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species."
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"Feel the feelings and drop the story."
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"If you want real control, drop the illusion of control; let life have you. It does anyway. You’re just telling yourself the story of how it doesn’t."
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"There is no story that is not true."
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"Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."
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"The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage."
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"Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it."
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"Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling."
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"Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story."
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