Story Quotes

“I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.”
― Vera Nazarian, Dreams Of The Compass Rose

“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“i immerse
myself
in you

like
i immerse myself
into a
beautiful story.”
― Sanober Khan

“كبذرة مزروعة في أعماق قلبي، أشعر بك، تنمو ببطء شديد، أراقب البذرة، وأخشى أن أغفل عنها فتموت.”
― لطيفة الحاج, الغيمة رقم 9

“The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.

The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“I'll tell you a secret.

Old storytellers never die.

They disappear into their own story.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“أيقنت في داخلي أنك لن تكون يوما لي.. فالعقبات كثيرة بيننا والاختلافات واضحة بين عالمينا، حتى إن بادلتني الشعور فلن تقوى على محاربة ظروفك من اجلي ولن أقوى على تحدي عجزي من أجلك.”
― لطيفة الحاج, هداك الله إلى قلب لا يشبه قلبي

“Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.
A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and then they're content.”
― Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo

“Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.”
― Don Roff

“Is there anyone’s life story you don’t want to know?”

“Not really.” His expression was unexpectedly serious. “Because people make a story of their lives.
Gains, losses, tragedy and triumph—you can tell a lot about someone simply by what they put into each
category. You can learn a lot about what you put into each category by your reaction to them. They
teach you about yourself without ever intending to do it—and they teach you a lot about life.”
― Michelle Sagara West, Cast in Fury

“No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me.
'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it...”
― Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan

“In life, every ending is just the start of another story.”
― Julian Barnes, Love, etc.

“If thinking should precede acting, then acting must succeed thinking.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story. Story within story. ”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“I see a broken shell and I remind myself that something might have needed setting free. See, broken things always have a story, don't they?”
― Sara Pennypacker, Summer of the Gypsy Moths

“The best thought any writer ever come up with is of having a world with Dragons.”
― Viraj J. Mahajan, A Young Admirer

“Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“And I’ll stop with the lecture now. I don’t like people much—they irritate and annoy me. But I’m
fascinated by them anyway.”
― Michelle Sagara West, Cast in Fury

“The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It’s the tender understanding that we’re living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there’s quite a bit of wonder in that.”
― F.K. Preston, The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing

“Most cowgirls are natural storytellers, their art honed by years of practice. . . . It serves as entertainment; it also preserves the humor and value of a unique way of life.”
― Teresa Jordan, Cowgirls: Women of the American West

“داستانها هرگز به پایان نمی رسند. راوی ست که معمولا صدایش را در نقطه ی جذاب و هنرمندانه قطع می کند؛ کلا همه اش همین است.”
― J.D. Salinger, نغمه‌ی غمگين

“Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung by the roadside, or carved into the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour is come.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.”
― Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

“The church… stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community Of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic