89 Inspiring Story Quotes

In our fast-paced and often chaotic world, stories have a unique power to inspire, uplift, and transform our perspectives. Whether shared through books, films, or personal anecdotes, they remind us of the beauty and resilience of the human spirit. We've curated a collection of the top 89 inspiring story quotes that capture the essence of this transformative power. These quotes not only entertain and engage but also offer wisdom and insight, encouraging us to dream bigger, act bolder, and live more meaningful lives. Join us on this journey of inspiration, as we explore words that have the potential to spark change and ignite passion within us all.

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

2. “What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.” - Neil Gaiman

3. “...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.That is their mystery and their magic.” - Arundhati Roy

4. “Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.” - Milan Kundera

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

6. “October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.” - Neil Gaiman

7. “Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.” - Neil Gaiman

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. “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

11. “They weren't true stories; they were better than that.” - Alice Hoffman

12. “These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.” - John Connolly

13. “Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.” - Alice Hoffman

14. “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

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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.” - John Connolly

19. “A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.” - Ben Okri

20. “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

21. “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

22. “What's the use of stories that aren't even true?” - Salman Rushdie

23. “All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.” - Nora Raleigh Baskin

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

25. “But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice things to have; they are essential survival tools. And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important as the stories we tell other people.” - Hugh MacLeod

26. “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” - Tim O'Brien

27. “. . .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

28. “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

29. “What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look.” - Dean Hughes

30. “Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.” - Neil Gaiman

31. “History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.” - Paul Murray

32. “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

33. “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

34. “When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.” - Orson Scott Card

35. “Our stories always contain average, ordinary people. They are the most unsuspecting victims of all.” - D.J. Weaver

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

37. “Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.” - Daniel J. Siegel

38. “Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.” - Samuel R. Delaney

39. “They are not my stories...they are merely mine to tell” - Jeremy Aldana

40. “I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets.In every face.” - Andrew Clements

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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.” - Jess C. Scott

46. “If there is such a thing as a universal--and I wasn't ready to throw all of mine out the window--it's that there is power in a story. And if someone pays you such a kindness as to make up a tale so you'll enjoy a gingersnap, you go along with that story and enjoy every last bite.” - Clare Vanderpool

47. “هالة تحيط بها، تبتسم فتتسع، تبكي فتنتشر، كل القلوب معها، وقلبها معه.” - لطيفة الحاج

48. “إنها مجنونة، متخبطة، وهي التي تكره المرأة المتخبطة، تكرر انه لم يعد يعني لها شيئا ثم تقودها أشواقها التي تنكرها إليه.” - لطيفة الحاج

49. “إنه يهرب وهي تحلم بعينيه على ضوء ذكرى جميلة جمعته بها وعلى صوت لحن قيثارة عشق عزفه يوما قلبها.” - لطيفة الحاج

50. “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

51. “Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal” - Howard Gardner

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

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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.” - Helen Humphreys

57. “There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.” - Helen Humphreys

58. “All stories are, in some form, prayers.” - Brian Doyle

59. “I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own—hard for me, at least.” - Gene Wolfe

60. “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

61. “Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.” - Cameron Conaway

62. “I wish I’d paid better attention. I didn’t yet think of time as finite. I didn’t fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind.” - Jessica Maria Tuccelli

63. “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

64. “I wore your promise on my finger for one yearI'll wear your name on my heart til I dieBecause you were my boy, you were my only boy forever.” - Coco J. Ginger

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

66. “Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.” - George R.R. Martin

67. “During an especially noisy elementary school assembly I witnessed a common marvel.  Someone spoke,"Once upon a time..." into the mic, and the room hushed.  Such magic never ceases to amaze me.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.” - Annette Simmons

72. “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

73. “Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.” - James Robertson

74. “But what all these responses have in common is that they point to the decisive power of information and stories [...]” - Wes Moore

75. “Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.” - Jasper Fforde

76. “The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.” - J. Aleksandr Wootton

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

78. “History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.” - Heather Anastasiu

79. “Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?” - Catherynne M. Valente

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

81. “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

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

83. “There's always more to the story, Catriona," She replied. "That's the wonderful thing about stories.” - Heather Vogel Frederick

84. “But bad luck makes good stories.” - Bernard Evslin

85. “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

86. “We create words, words create wonders.” - Chandan Sharma

87. “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

88. “The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.” - Haruki Murakami

89. “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