Story quotations

Page 3

◆ When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

- John Berger99

◆ Free yourself from the inauthenticity and disempowerment of your story.

- Steve Maraboli98

◆ Enemies are people who's story you haven't heard, or who's face you haven't seen.

- Irene Butter98

◆ If something wants to be a story, it will be.

- Scarlett Thomas98

◆ Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

- Horacio Quiroga98

◆ You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.

- Patricia Briggs98

◆ Every song deserves lyrics. Deserves a story to tell.

- Courtney C. Stevens98

◆ My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

- Maggie Stiefvater98

◆ Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

- Chinua Achebe98

◆ He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.

- Chelsie Shakespeare98

◆ It is the story that matters not just the ending.

- Paul Lockhart98

◆ In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.

- George Saunders98

◆ There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

- Cormac McCarthy98

◆ What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

- Pat Conroy98

◆ She can paint a lovely picture, but this story has a twist. her paintbrush is a razor, and her canvas is her wrist.

- Amy Efaw98