“...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

Arundhati Roy - “...the secret of the Great Stories is...” 1

Similar quotes

“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”

John Piper
Read more

“You don’t read, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to live in different worlds, to travel on great adventures through the galaxy with people you know better than you know your own family. To live and die with them. These are my friends, my best friends in the world.”

Atticus Shaffer
Read more

“Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.”

Ann Voskamp
Read more

“You live your day-to-day life hiding the essence of who you are; you don’t want to let someone into that life who won’t accept you for that same thing.”

Kristen Ashley
Read more

“Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.”

Arundhati Roy
Read more