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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"Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?"
"If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?"
"The time is just right to take risks and tell stories the way we want to tell them."
"So yo then man what's your story?"
"We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story."
"Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal."
"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories."
"I love telling stories. I like the challenges presented to me on a daily basis. There's nothing resting about acting."
"Choices are much more practical and small when you're dealing with a real story. It's about execution, it's not about content."
"The trick to making a story matter is that every now and then, somebody you care about has to go. If it's somebody that you don't care about, then it doesn't really have - the stakes aren't there. But if you do that every now and then, then the story matters to people. And there are actual stakes involved, emotional stakes."
"We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking."
"I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space."
"I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories."
"A really good horror film has a story."
"When telling a story about how wasted you were last night, stop."
"Ouch! And Marino goes down quicker than his Boonesfarm-infused sister in the back of my '68 Cutlass on our first date after watching 'Love Story' at the drive-in."
"Alright, all right," I said. "What if I tell you a story, instead?" Highlanders loved stories, and Jamie was no exception. "Oh, aye, " he said, sounding much happier. "What sort of story is it?"
"When God closes a door, he opens a window. Yeah. The problem was that this particular window opened off the tenth story, and he wasn't so sure God supplied parachutes."
"I love story songs because I've always loved books."
"...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down."
