Stories quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside stories — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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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."
"The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage."
"Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it."
"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."
"Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story."
"In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work."
"Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."
"I’ve seen the nations rise and fall. I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival."
"The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were."
"Packaging can be theater, it can create a story"
"Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy... When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes."
"There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future."
"When we deny our stories, They define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending."
"The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible."
"Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it."
"Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller."
"Everybody has a story. And there's something to be learned from every experience."
"I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on."
"The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it."
"A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters"
