Quotes on Stories

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

Every once in a while, there comes a story. A story that blows your mind. One where you know you've made a difference. That's what makes it all worthwhile. That and the anticipation. It's addictive, because you never know when it will happen, but when it does, nothing in the world is as important.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

My students often say, "My roommate read this story and really liked it", and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, "well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something."

Jesus made everything so simple and we have made it so complicated. He spoke to the people in short sentences and everyday words, illustrating His messages with never-to-be forgotten stories.

I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don't attach any importance to my life any more. I'm alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics.

It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers,the people, the common man,prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling bad things than in selling good things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.

To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

In drama, I think, the audience is a willing participant. It's suspending a certain kind of disbelief to try to get something out of a story.