Life is too short for a long story.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) English Aristocrat, Poet, Novelist, Writer
To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) (1885–1962) Danish Novelist, Short-story Writer
Their story, yours, mine—it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.
—Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American Paleontologist, Science Writer
The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.
—Laurence Sterne (1713–68) Irish Anglican Novelist, Clergyman
You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.
—Anthony de Mello (1931–87) Indian-born American Theologian
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
—Willa Cather (1873–1947) American Novelist, Writer
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—“Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
—Paul Auster (1947–2024) American Novelist, Filmmaker, Postmodern Thinker
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) American Poet, Writer
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. – Hoffer, Eric.
—Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. – Hemingway, Ernest.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German Literary and Marxist Critic
Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (1904–91) American Children’s Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries….
—Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian Novelist
Under the Earth I go,
On the oak leaf I stand.
I ride on the filly
That was never foaled,
And I carry the dead in my hand.
—Anonymous
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. – Chandler, Raymond.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.
—Philip Pullman (b.1946) English Children’s Author
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as ’twas said to me.
—Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish Novelist, Poet, Playwright, Lawyer
The story – from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
—Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman
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