stories Quotes

“You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.”

“What a tale their terror tells.”

“Every story matters...We are all worthy of telling our stories and having them heard. We all need to be seen and honored in the same way that we all need to breathe.”

“The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity.”

“Each of the stories we tell and hear is like a small flicker of light - when we have enough of them, we will set the world on fire. But I don’t think we can do it without story. It doesn’t matter what community is in question or what the conflict appears to be on the surface, resolution and change will require people to own, share, and rumble with stories.”

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”

“We don’t want to betray anyone - we don’t want to be the first to get curious and ask questions or challenge the stories. We ask ourselves, How can I love and protect my family if I’m rumbling with these hard truths? For me, the answer to that question is another question: How can I love and protect my family if I’m not rumbling with these hard truths?”

“A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, ‘My story matters because I matter.’ A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn’t. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we’ve convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster.”

“Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.”

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

“Those are the most important stories to share. You can use that strength to pave a path for others to follow along behind.”

“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it.”

“If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen.”

“Between the lines of every story there is another story, and that is one that is never heard and can only be guessed at by the people who are good at guessing.”

“’It IS a story,’ said Sara. ‘EVERYTHING’S a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.’”

“I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn’t exist.”

“What about a story?” said Christopher Robin.

“Every great love starts with a great story. . .”

“I’m much better at interpreting books and stories than I am at understanding the decisions made by living, breathing people.”

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”

“If we don’t tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won’t believe it.”

″‘But they’re stories,’ I said. ‘They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.‘”

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

“If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

“I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

“It’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

“First you will smile, and then you will cry—don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

“Some stories don’t need telling.”

″‘She’s just doing Margo stuff. Making stories. Rocking worlds.‘”

“Would you like to hear my story, Bella? It doesn’t have a happy ending – but which of ours does? If we had happy endings, we’d all be under gravestones now.”

“It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same. He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence. The last time he was there, Jurgis had thought of little but his family; but now he was free to listen to these men, and to realize that he was one of them—that their point of view was his point of view, and that the way they kept themselves alive in the world was the way he meant to do it in the future.”

“By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the...field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”

“The little horse had drawn more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, who was Second, Hitler (third), Mussolini (fourth), or any other newsmaker. His match with War Admiral was almost certainly the single biggest news story of the year and one of the biggest sports moments of the century.”

“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…”

“Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.”

“All stories are true.”

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

“And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!’ And they’ll say: ‘Yes, that’s one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn’t he dad?’ ‘Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.‘”

“What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?”

“That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.”

″‘Hide them. Keep them safe for me,’ I said, putting my hands on top of his. ‘I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t want them to be destroyed. There’s so much of me, of all of us, in these drawings.‘”

“Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.”

“My mother, I have seen another [dream. I beheld] my likeness in the street. In Erech of the wide spaces he hurled the axe, and they assembled about him.”

“A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.”

“And if Aslan himself comes, (Cair Paravel) would be the best place for meeting him too, for every story says that he is the son of the great Emperor-over-the-Sea, and over the sea he will pass.”

“Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are in which the ending is a surprise.”

“There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

“‘You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories—’”

“In that narrow cut of light I saw a face that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the nightmares of my childhood.”

“I won’t have the time, so you’ll have to do it. Just write it all down like you’re talking. Put in all the fun we had, the cool things we did. Our adventures.”

“I’m telling tales, my dear, not lies. Lies are mean things, and tales are meant to entertain.”

“I don’t think it was a lie, Maxwell, do you? I think he needed something to hope for and so he invented this rather remarkable fantasy you describe. Everybody needs something to hope for. Don’t call it a lie. Kevin wasn’t a liar.”

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. ”

“My story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”

“But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to.”

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”

“Some day you will write a great story out of your own head, that will be a comfort and help to many.”

“We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we’re just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don’t mean anything.”

“ ‘We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here, William. We’re a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?’ I didn’t. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father’s dream I remembered where we’d met before. ‘And what did my father do for you?’ I asked him, and the old man smiled. ‘He made me laugh,’ he said.”

″‘What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.’ ‘What does the story mean, then?’ ‘It means what you want it to mean,’ Hoid said. ‘The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.‘”

“All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.”

″ So much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded. ”

“Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points in every life, the sudden moments of decision where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed.”

“Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbours’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had and then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage”

“In school, we learned about the world before ours, about the angels and gods that lived in the sky, ruling the earth with kind and loving hands. Some say those are just stories, but I don’t believe that. The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”

“This is the end of a story that even people who are not usually amazed at anything may refuse to believe. But I am armed in advance against human incredulity.”

“It’s important that you know. Our family memory must not be lost.”

“I was thinking about framing, and how so much of what we think about our lives and our personal histories revolves around how we frame it. The lens we see it through, or the way we tell our own stories. We mythologize ourselves.”

“I’ve heard so many stories I don’t know which one is the most popular. But I do know which is the least popular. The truth.”

“I like my tale better,” said Littlefinger, “and so will the smallfolk. Most of them believe that if a woman eats rabbit while pregnant, her child will be born with long floppy ears.”

“I could tell you a scary story to get your teeth chattering, Something about a really old man, sitting in a squeaky rocking chair, pointing at you.”

“He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.”

“A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”

“I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.”

“I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.”

“The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration.”

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

“We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.”

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

“I usually tell the two Z’s stories about home, and about Dad and our Bahkhuls or Arjays. Yes, it is good they hear these stories. Not about things from here.”

“I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.”

“And on my life I would never suggest to you that stories cannot be forgotten in the bone, even when a brother or a wizard or a rifle says you must, you must forget it, it never happened; there is only the world as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”

“Such amusing fiction, these stories they tell. It always comes to this. If they really had a desire to live, they would’ve been more aware of how easy it is to die, would’ve chosen their actions more wisely. In these moments, you can tell they’re not regretting having hurt you, they regret doing it to your face.”

“I listened to their stories and found so many areas where we overlapped – not all the deeds, but the feelings of remorse and hopelessness. I learned that alcoholism isn’t a sin, it’s a disease.”

“That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end.”

“For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes.”

“Go on, admit it, the book whispers its story to you at night.”

“To think of all the times I’ve wished I could slip into one of my favorite books. But that’s the advantage of reading—you can shut the book whenever you want.”

“What a fool you are, Basta! I’m not talking about children’s magic. I mean the magic of the written word. Nothing is more powerful for good or evil, I do assure you.”

″‘Once upon a time,’ he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”

“A long time ago, people used to tell magical stories of wonder and enchantment. Those stories were called Fairy Tales. Those stories are not in this book. The stories in this book are almost Fairy Tales. But not quite. The stories in this book are Fairly Stupid Tales.”

“I get it,” said Michael. “Maybe good luck and bad luck are all mixed up. You never know what will happen next.”

“He lived a simple life.”

“The older monk quickly picked her up and put her on his back, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other side. She didn’t thank the older monk, she just shoved him out of the way and departed.”

“The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg.”

“I’d never been to the Point […] Once Dazza and I decided we were going to do it. […] But then we started thinking about those stories they told in the front bar – wild Nungas with spears, boomerangs that come from nowhere and knock you senseless. We got scared and ran all the way back to the Port.”

Instead of being stories of hope for children, I suspect their massive appeal lies in the fact they are really wildly-nostalgic stories for adults about how broken childhoods (and sometimes even broken adulthoods) should have been.

Tender and lyrical prose, gentle and almost achingly poignant moments and a golden daffy-down-dilly air pervading the stories: make sure you grab your tissue box before reading the Kingdom of Silk series.

“Robert rushed to the gravel-pit, found the Psammead, and presently wished for— But that, too, is another story.”

“Facts are fine, fer as they go... but they’re like water bugs skittering atop the water. Legends, now — they go deep down and bring up the heart of a story.”

“She turns her thinker-upper on. She lets it softly purr. It thinks up friendly little things with smiles and fuzzy fur.”

“I can lick twenty-two tigers today...”

“You’re excused! You may go. Your fingernails aren’t very clean.”

“It’s not fair, after all, to lick tigers so small.”

“You! Down there! WIth the curly hair. Will you please step out of line.”

“But my favorite was How Papa Got His Glass EYe. He’s always tell it different-- sometimes scary, sometimes sad, and once I laughed so hard I fell off his lap.”

“Poor Zooie got so awfully mad so mad he could have spit.”

“Long distance is expensive!”

“And I flew through the air and I went for a sail and I sprained the main bone in the tip of my tail!”

“Now I never had ever had troubles before.”

“And I learned there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind.”

“It may be history, it may be only a legend, a tradition. It may have happened, it may not have happened: but it could have happened. It may be that the wise and the learned believed it in the old days; it maybe that only the unlearned and the simple loved it and credited it.”

“Some of you chaps should go home and take naps.”

“It is said that the current duke had an ancestor so wise that even as a child he could do complex mathematical calculations. prove difficult geometric theorems, and accurately locate the constellations in the sky.”

“And though over time, many versions have arisen, some wildly exaggerated, others plainly false, you will find no truer account than this, of those extraordinary events that surrounded The Great Escape from City Zoo.”

“He thought of the deep crevasses and windy caves of Underlay, and the stories of the creatures that dwelt there. Of course, he didn’t believe in them. He’d told them, because the handing on of an oral mythology was very important to a developing culture, but he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him.”

“Mum doesn’t believe the story about the Moodagudda but I do, and I’m too scared to keep my back to the river.”

“I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began.”

“Grace was a girl who loved stories. She didn’t mind if they were read to her or told to her or made up from her own head. She didn’t care if they were from books or movies or out of Nana’s long memory. Grace just loved stories.”

“One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”

“The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.”

“And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.”

“we both thought we were on the same page but it turns out we’re reading different stories”

“How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.”

“Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.”

″‘All stories grow from a seed of truth,’ Truyde said. ‘They are knowledge after figuration.‘”

“How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground!”

“The stories are old and fluid, as old as humankind. They’re somehow familiar, as if she were born knowing them.”

″‘Grandaddy came here in his mama’s, Sarah’s, arms,’ Jones said quietly. ‘She wasn’t free yet. The war wasn’t started but it was coming. Only Sarah couldn’t wait. I expect she ran until she found a place big enough to free her troubles. Just the clothes on her back, that half-dead child and the song she sang to him, my granddaddy. He grew up and sang it to my daddy. And he to me.‘”

“There she was, hurrying over the last hill facing the mountain. She always glanced behind her, never trusting the empty trail as she raced ahead, carrying something. M.C. knew the story by heart. He knew she ran for freedom. She carried a baby.”

“Everyone had a story about a family member who’d had to go in to hiding, or a friend who’d been dragged off to a concentration camp, or a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. Then they moved on to rumours about the war- about Patton, the American general who was making such good progress on the Western Front...”

“So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?”, my mother always asked me. “I don’t know”, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”

“Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.”

“Little boy, you are making up stories again. There is nothing in the meadow but grass and trees. Go into the meadow and see for yourself.”

“So the lion in the meadow became a house lion and lived in the broom cupboard, and when the little boy had apples, stories and a goodnight hug, the lion had apples, stories and a goodnight hug as well.”

“But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”

“Tom had few ideas on the causes and cures of sleeplessness, and it never occurred to him to complain. At first he tried to read himself to sleep with Aunt Gwen’s schoolgirl stories. They did not even bore him enough for that...”

Gustas is nearly killed in the hurricane, trying to save his banana tree. Gustas fights his way through a Caribbean hurricane to save his ‘navel string’. Its fruits wil buy him a longed-for pair of shoes, so that at last Gustas can go on outings with the the cricket team.

“As it walks one way, it sings songs. As it walks the other, it tells stories. This is one of the stories the cat tells.”

“Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge.′

“The master used to tell stories long into the night. When he began to tell them, the maid would light the fire. The maid knew all the stories and would stoke up the fire as the story began to build. When it became monotonous, she would let the fire die down and, at moments of excitement, she would put on more wood until the story ended and she allowed the fire to go out.”

“Fairy Bread Come up here, O dusty feet! Here is fairy bread to eat, Here in my retiring room, Children, you may dine On the golden smell of broom And the shade of the pine; And when you have eaten well, Fairy stories hear and tell.”

“What struck Tom’s youthful imagination was the desperate and lawless character of most of the stories. Was the guard hoaxing him? He couldn’t help hoping that they were true. It’s very odd how almost all English boys love danger. You can get ten to join a game, or climb a tree, or swim a stream, when there’s a chance of breaking their limbs or getting drowned, for one who’ll stay on level ground, or in his depth, or play quoits or bowls.”

“This was how Desiree thought of herself then: the single dynamic force in Stella’s life, a gust of wind strong enough to rip out her roots. This was the story Desiree needed to tell herself and Stella allowed her to. They both felt safe inside.”

“I loved escaping from reality, especially during times of trouble. Stories made everything possible.”

“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet- clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act?”

“I would tell you stories from dawn to dusk if it meant filling your eyes with happiness.”

“If you can think of anything more terrifying than that happening to you in the middle of the night, then let’s hear about it.”

“It concerns the failing health of an elderly king who is kept alive by stories told by visiting animals.”

“What sort of stories does he like?” “About himself. Because he’s that sort of Bear.”

Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much lovemaking into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts any because she says it makes her feel so silly when she had to read it out loud. Jane’s stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

“Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and her Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died.”

“Jo, your stories are works of Shakespeare compared to half the rubbish that is published every day.”