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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
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The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
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Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
-Robert McKee
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Life is too short for a long story.
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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-Ben Okri
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-Ben Okri
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We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
-Plato
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'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.
-Philip Pullman
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While history offers us many stories worth telling, some belong to other people, who paid for them with their lives. We may retell their stories badly or well. We may embellish them or get them wrong. But we should not do so blithely, just as we should not scrawl slogans on other people's houses, or stride into their living rooms to replace the furniture. Thinking that we can is not novel history. It's novel morality, unworthy of artists and storytellers.
-Carlin Romano
Accuracy: A Novel Notion in Historical Novels? Chronicle of Higher Education, (vol. 47, no. 31), p. B13, April 13, 2001
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The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
-Muriel Rukeyser
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
-Salman Rushdie
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I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
-Sir Walter Scott
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, (canto II, st. 22)
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Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it
-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
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Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
-William Shakespeare
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With a tale, for sooth, he comet unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
-Sir Philip Sidney
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People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
-Steven Spielberg
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We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel-
-John Steinbeck
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The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.
-Laurence Sterne
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Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.
-Jonathan Swift
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People are hungry for stories. It
-Studs Terkel
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Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.
-Jim Trelease
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The first law of story-telling. Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.
-Mrs. Humphrey Ward
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Lives are not stories. A day, a month, a year, or a lifetime has no plot. Our experiences are only the raw stuff of stories. The beginnings of our lives are arbitrary; usually their endings come too soon or too late for any neat narrative conclusions.
We turn our lives into stories, and, in doing so, we can stop them where we choose. Our stories do in a small way what memoirs and autobiographies do on a grander scale: they allow a self-fashioning that gives remembered lives a coherence that the day-to-day lives of actual experience lack. History, of course, also imposes coherence, but the historian works will less malleable stuff than memory. Memoirs are seamless; good histories disrupt.
-Richard White
Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 292.
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She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten.
-Richard White
Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 247-248.
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Their story, yours and mine -- it
-William Carlos Williams
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Books about Storytelling
