143 Inspiring Stories And Quotes

In a world brimming with challenges and uncertainties, stories and quotes have the power to uplift, inspire, and ignite the human spirit. Whether it's through the courage of an unsung hero, the wisdom of a celebrated figure, or the resilience in overcoming life's hurdles, these narratives remind us of the strength and potential within each of us. Our curated collection of 143 inspiring stories and quotes is designed to offer not only motivation and encouragement but also to spark introspection and personal growth. Dive into these tales of triumph and words of wisdom, and let them guide you on your journey towards a more fulfilling and empowered life.

1. “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 Berger

2. “We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.” - Charles de Lint

3. “It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.” - Haruki Murakami

4. “Hold it. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the three bears eat the three little pigs, and then the bears join up with the big bad wolf and eat Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood! Tell me a story like that, OK?” - Bill Watterson

5. “The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?Doesn't that make life a story?” - Yann Martel

6. “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.” - Patrick Rothfuss

7. “That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” - Tim O'Brien

8. “But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?” - Wally Lamb

9. “Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” - Terry Pratchett

10. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open.” - Muriel Rukeyser

11. “By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.” - Christopher Moore

12. “A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.” - Marcus Sedgwick

13. “In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ” - Alberto Manguel

14. “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

15. “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.” - Beryl Markham

16. “It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.” - C.S. Lewis

17. “But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]” - T.C. Boyle

18. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” - ursula le guin

19. “But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.” - Mitch Albom

20. “Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking--only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.” - Daniel Alarcon

21. “When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

22. “Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.” - Madeleine L'Engle

23. “Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.” - Neil Gaiman

24. “Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.” - John Connolly

25. “There are people.There are stories.The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.” - Alan Moore

26. “We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.” - Brian Wicker

27. “Not all events are stories.” - Scarlett Thomas

28. “We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want life to be full of adventure and creativity and daring that might, just might, be real.” - Dana Frank

29. “Every story needs to be worth telling.” - Vera Nazarian

30. “Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as seperate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming.True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction -don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. (p.87)” - Jeanette Winterson

31. “Living your life is a long and doggy business. . . . And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.” - Anne Fine

32. “Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....” - Paul Murray

33. “But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.” - Kaye Gibbons

34. “But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.” - Orson Scott Card

35. “In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.” - Michael Richardson

36. “This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)” - Elizabeth Gilbert

37. “The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)” - A.E. Housman

38. “We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers. And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own. If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us. We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special. We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread. We have friends who lend us their favorite books. Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears. All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes. Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.” - Lois Lowry

39. “The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale...” - Vera Nazarian

40. “I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.” - Patrick Rothfuss

41. “Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.” - Neil Gaiman

42. “The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” - Rebecca Solnit

43. “. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.” - Richard Paul Evans

44. “Then a person has only one tale?” No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.” - Chris Wooding

45. “She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.” - Cornelia Funke

46. “If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.” - John Berger

47. “Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.” - Sylvia Plath

48. “The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.” - Philippe Grimbert

49. “Why write stories? To join the conversation.” - Dorothy Allison

50. “I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.” - Gabrielle Zevin

51. “...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.” - Rabih Alameddine

52. “People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!” - CK Webb

53. “It is a long journey, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Take nothing and no one for granted, be humble always, be kind especially when it's difficult and never forget the place where you came from and the people that helped you get where you are. These things will live on in you and through you, long after the words have faded.” - CK Webb

54. “These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.” - Edwidge Danticat

55. “I'm sorry to burden you,' she said. She felt like a crybaby.'What can we do with our stories,' he said, 'but tell them?” - Sena Jeter Naslund

56. “Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.” - Salman Rushdie

57. “It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.” - Margaret Atwood

58. “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.” - Tim O'Brien

59. “I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?” - Ursula K. Le Guin

60. “A well told story can be magic. Let me show you...” - Jo Lynne Valerie

61. “Stories are a different kind of true.” - Emma Donoghue

62. “This is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a lie right from the start!” - Hiro Mashima

63. “When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.” - Roman Payne

64. “I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.” - Andrew Clements

65. “It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.” - Marion Dane Bauer

66. “There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.” - David James Duncan

67. “Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart” - Stephen R. Lawhead

68. “Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned.” - Nathan Myhrvold

69. “Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.” - Rebecca McKinsey

70. “Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman. After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof. "A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")” - Daphne du Maurier

71. “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.” - Ernest Hemingway

72. “This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk.” - Patrick Rothfuss

73. “Day 72I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me.” - Gemma Seltzer

74. “يعلو، أجلس في تلك السلة، وحدي فوقي السماء، تحتي أرض وناس، ووجوه باسمة تنظر نحوي، نحو المنطاد.” - لطيفة الحاج

75. “في نظرته شيء يشبه السحر، لا تذكر شيئا سوى نظرته وخطواته المبتعدة عنها وقلبها!” - لطيفة الحاج

76. “لا أعرف لم تمسكت بك كل تلك الفترة، كان ذلك القصر الأفلاطوني معقل أفكاري التي صغتها قصائد عشق وترانيم أشواق اغتيلت قبل أن تكمل سنوات طفولتها الأولى.” - لطيفة الحاج

77. “I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.” - Clive Barker

78. “Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.” - Patrick Ness

79. “There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” - Erin Morgenstern

80. “...I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better.” - Simon Van Booy

81. “For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.” - Tahir Shah

82. “My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.” - Tahir Shah

83. “My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.” - Tahir Shah

84. “Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” - Tahir Shah

85. “By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.” - Rabih Alameddine

86. “I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.” - Katherine Applegate

87. “Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.” - Jennifer Donnelly

88. “Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.” - Mary O'Hara

89. “Everyone's got a different story.” - Emma Donoghue

90. “Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.” - Catherynne M. Valente

91. “Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.” - Neil Gaiman

92. “It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never looked at it, not looked at it.” - Neil Gaiman

93. “Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

94. “We're all stories, in the end.” - Steven Moffat

95. “People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.” - Louise Penny

96. “Sneaking was a kind of deceit. So was disguise. Just past midnight, wearing dark trousers and Fox's hood, the queen snuck out of her own rooms and stepped into a world of stories and lies.” - Kristin Cashore

97. “I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts.  It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

98. “We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive.” - Alexis M. Smith

99. “The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.” - John Verdon

100. “The secret to your purpose is to find what you feel is important, and not pursue what others would think is important. When you think highly of yourself, me thinking highly of you will never be enough!” - Shannon L. Alder

101. “What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do. -Silenus” - Robert Jackson Bennett

102. “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” - George Lucas

103. “Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.” - Randy Alcorn

104. “He. Does there have to be a he? It seems weak and unoriginal doesn’t it, for stories told by girls to always have a he?” - Rinsai Rossetti

105. “Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

106. “And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.” - Erin Morgenstern

107. “Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.” - Shannon L. Alder

108. “Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.” - zadie smith

109. “Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.” - Hilary Mantel

110. “Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.” - Lisa Cron

111. “Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.” - Erin Morgenstern

112. “For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.” - Anna Funder

113. “When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.” - Diane Setterfield

114. “My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.” - Elizabeth Hernandez

115. “Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?” - Julianna Baggott

116. “The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.” - Jonathan Rosen

117. “Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.” - Nora Raleigh Baskin

118. “It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.” - Dejan Stojanovic

119. “We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive... Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can't die.” - Candace Fleming

120. “...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

121. “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

122. “What are stories for if we don't learn from them?” - Cornelia Funke

123. “Stories arrest us. Parents use stories to capture the attention of active children. Preachers use stories to capture the attention of sleepy adults.” - Tony Reinke

124. “I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?” - David Byrne

125. “To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.” - Marita Golden

126. “That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.” - Stefanos Livos

127. “Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.” - Erica Lorraine Scheidt

128. “Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.” - Anais Nin

129. “There's more to stories than it seems at first looking," she said. "Two sides to most stories. Folks better be thinking about that for once.” - Augusta Scattergood

130. “There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.” - Kelly Barnhill

131. “Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.” - Barry Lopez

132. “People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.” - Marjorie Pay Hinckley

133. “You can never know enough about your characters” - W. Somerset Maugham

134. “It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.” - Tom Hiddleston

135. “Without stories, we’d have even more trouble recognizing what’s real.” - Amy Neftzger

136. “Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table.” - Shannon L. Alder

137. “We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.” - Mohsin Hamid

138. “Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?” - Terry Moore

139. “So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.” - Flannery O'Connor

140. “We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.” - Mani S. Sivasubramanian

141. “Maybe like the never-ending stories within stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, life is dream within dream all the way through?” - H.M. Forester

142. “Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.” - Leslie Ford

143. “Literature is the real life of imaginary people.” - Stefanos Livos