77 Stories And Quotes

In a world brimming with information, the timeless power of stories and quotes remains unparalleled. Whether it's a tale that stirs your emotions or a quote that sparks inspiration, these nuggets of wisdom have a unique way of resonating with our inner selves. Today, we invite you on a journey through a curated collection of the top 77 stories and quotes, specially selected to uplift, motivate, and enlighten. Each entry has been chosen for its ability to touch hearts and minds, providing a moment of reflection or a spark of motivation. Let's delve into this treasure trove of inspiration together.

1. “a story is ready when it falls from your face” - steve aylett

2. “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

3. “My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. 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

4. “It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.” - Katherine Hannigan

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

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

7. “If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?” - Thomas Hardy

8. “Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.” - Anne Fadiman

9. “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

10. “I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.” - Dave Eggers

11. “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

12. “Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.” - Rachel Remen

13. “Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he, Dad?' 'Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that's saying a lot.' Frodo: [continue walking] You've left out one of the chief characters - Samwise the Brave. I want to hear more about Sam. [stops and turns to Sam] Frodo: Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam. Sam: Now Mr. Frodo, you shouldn't make fun; I was being serious. Frodo: So was I. [they continue to walk] Sam: Samwise the Brave...” - J.R.R. Tolkien

14. “We owe it to each other to tell stories.” - Neil Gaiman

15. “People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.” - Scarlett Thomas

16. “People who understand everything get no stories.” - Bertolt Brecht

17. “But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.” - Terry Pratchett

18. “All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.” - Umberto Eco

19. “You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.” - Marian Keyes

20. “They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.” - Paulette Jiles

21. “So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.” - John Marsden

22. “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

23. “We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.” - Lewis Hyde

24. “How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be important?But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper.It was all about words.If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.” - Linda Sue Park

25. “Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.” - Jeanette Winterson

26. “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

27. “A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.""You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.""And if it was?""In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.""In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.""You do not find this rather narrow?""Madam—""Well?""I was quoting you.” - Steven Brust

28. “Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.” - Sei Shonagon

29. “People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.” - Neil Gaiman

30. “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

31. “Think of all the stories you've heard, Bast. You have a young boy, the hero. His parents are killed he sets out for vengeance. What next?"Bast hesitated, his expression puzzled. Chronicler answered the question instead. "He finds help. A clever talking squirrel. An old drunken swordsman. A mad hermit in the woods. That sort of thing."Kvothe nodded. "Exactly! He finds the mad hermit in the woods, proves himself worthy, and learns the names of all things, just like Taborlin the Great. Then with these powerful magics at his beck and call, what does he do?"Chronicler shrugged. "He finds the villains and kills them." "Of course," Kvothe said grandly. "Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.” - Patrick Rothfuss

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

33. “So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.” - N.K. Jemisin

34. “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.” - Téa Obreht

35. “Stories are masks of God.That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.” - Melanie Tem

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Stories don't always have happy endings."This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.” - Patrick Ness

39. “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

40. “بعد رحيلك كان صعبا علي الاحتفاظ بأي من ذكرياتك، بأي شيء يمكن أن يعيدني إليك أو يعيدك إلي، أردت أن أتغير طناا مني إني سأتخلص منك.” - لطيفة الحاج

41. “تتوقف دموعها وتستمر الأفكار كتيار قوي مندفع يسبب الألم لكل خلية من خلايا دماغها ويدمر فيها أي رغبة بالابتسام.” - لطيفة الحاج

42. “All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.” - Catherynne M. Valente

43. “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

44. “He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.” - Sherman Alexie

45. “The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.” - Sally Odgers

46. “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

47. “Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.” - Franny Billingsley

48. “Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.” - Brian Doyle

49. “We come together as a community — in our sitting room, in sacred space or in a coffee shop. We share our joy and pain, our surprises and disappointments, successes and failures and we try to make some sense of it all. We listen to find some way to connect. We give reassurance or advice. Sometimes we say nothing because just being there is enough. Storytelling is that moment in time when we are not alone - I met my Soul in a Coffee Shop” - Louise Gilbert

50. “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

51. “We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for.That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out?” - Markus Zusak

52. “everything in our culture tells men and boys to avoid any interest, activity or community dominated by women - and when article after article insists that boys are reading less than girls; when the pop cultural discourse shies away from portraying boys as readers, or closely associates male reading with male unpopularity and outcastness; when the humanities is widely touted as being the feminine alternative to the masculine sciences; when finally, after centuries of exclusion, girls are actually getting a break at something, the consequence is that boys are keeping away in droves.[...]Having been raised to exclude girls from manly pursuits, boys are also reluctant to pursue female ones. If that means reading – and in some cases, sadly, it does, reading and other sedentary or indoor hobbies being viewed as the antithesis of sports, and therefore by extension the enemy of all things masculine – then writing more boy-centric books won’t help. (Unless, of course, your ultimate long-term plan is to take reading away from girls and return it to boys, in which case, you fail everything.) If, on the other hand, you want boys and girls to be reading with equal passion and in equal numbers, then a very clear alternative presents itself: teach your boys that there’s nothing wrong with girls, or girl things, period. Take away the stigma, and let everyone read without judgement. Stories are genderless, no matter who writes or stars in them. And if we can’t bear to teach our teenagers that, then we need to seriously rethink our sstatus as an equal and fair society.” - Foz Meadows

53. “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

54. “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

55. “It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.” - Robert Michael Pyle

56. “And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.” - Erica Lorraine Scheidt

57. “This is not the way these tales end," Calliope said firmly."This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales," Amatus said, "but since ours is not yet told, we cannot count on it. There were a hundred dead princes on the thorns outside Sleeping Beauty's castle, and I'm sure many of them were splendid fellows.” - john barnes

58. “People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people” - Alasdair Gray

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.” - Margaret Thatcher

62. “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

63. “In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.” - Geoff Ryman

64. “I love words.  I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail.  I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum.  I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over.   In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

65. “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

66. “Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.” - Catherynne M. Valente

67. “And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real” - Mary Oliver

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

69. “[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.” - Roberto Bolaño

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

71. “In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.” - Marjorie Pay Hinckley

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

73. “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” - C.S. Lewis

74. “I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?” - Charles de Lint

75. “Kitapus pievelės juodavo vėją užstojanti pušų giraitė, iš už kurios atsklisdavo bangų mūša. Nuožmių Ramiojo vandenyno bangų. Jos ošė sodriais ir niūriais balsais it daugybė susispietusių sielų, šnabždančių kiekviena savo istorijas. Ir atrodė, kad prisidėti prie šio choro ir papasakoti kitų istorijų trokšta dar daugiau sielų.” - Haruki Murakami

76. “Fairy tales are rife with transformation — from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks.(Source: "The Nature of Cinderella".)” - Marie Rutkoski

77. “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