Quotes on Stories

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Have a strong vision about the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

The seventh day of creation is the most eloquent and insightful as to the nature of God. From a literary perspective, the Sabbath forms the pinnacle of the story. Like the dramatic kiss of a soldier returning from war, this is the moment we’re not meant to miss. In choosing rest as the grand finale, God reveals himself as one driven by neither anxiety nor fear but one who finds gladness in both the work of creation and the creation of work.

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons

No story lives unless someone wants to listen. So thank you, all of you.

Until, modern times when it became mostly a civic task, education was considered a sacred work. It was sacred because it involved the indwelling spirit in the student and because it required an awakened spirit in the teachers. Spirit to spirit, genius to genius, soul to soul go the true lessons that help young people become themselves. Ultimately, each person holds the key to the story trying to be lived from within, but first someone else must help unlock the mystery of one’s life.

It's time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.

Acquire wisdom from the story of those who have already passed.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.

Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.

Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.

I don't believe that the world is that crazy that they have nothing to better to do with their time than send me emails and tell me these outlandish stories. So I've started to plot the communities that have come to me on a map.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

The story, from beginning to end, I found again in a heart of a friend.