Explore Quotes on Stories

Documentarian Laura Poitras has crafted a first-rate Hitchcockian-type thriller telling the story of Edward Snowden.

For several weeks, I have been the subject of leaked stories, conjecture, and false attacks about a land exchange. None of them bear any resemblance to the truth, including the rumor that I am planning on resigning.

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.

I have some good stories yet to tell.

Actually ideas are everywhere. It's the paperwork, that is, sitting down and thinking them into a coherent story, trying to find just the right words, that can and usually does get to be labor.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

The dynamism and freedom that characterizes the West is the product of Christianity's reforming itself and moving forward culturally. The ascendancy of the West is the story of the difference that Christianity makes, and it's a story we can't let our culture forget.

It's time to begin righting the story of your life.

Pace doesn't mean speed; it means the right speed. Diagnosis and cure are simple. If you've reached where you want to be in your story too quickly, ask yourself what you've left out. If you've come to a certain point too slowly, ask yourself what kept you so long.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.

Bear in Mind...that all Histories from the Rock at Plymouth, and Jamestown to the present time, have been made by white men, and a man who tells his own story, is always right until the adversary's tale is told.

I look to everyday magic in art to remember how to live: how to estrange and vivify ordinary objects and beings. So little, really, is ordinary, but to remember this I need the brain chemical of painting and film and reading I had a thrummy doomed oracular feeling when I wrote blackened baby teeth into my little blind boy story: I saw teeth and in an instant they were becoming something else. They were buckshot. They were food. They were tiny flightless corvids.

The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time.

Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Someone who wants to be with you, WILL be with you. End of story.

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.