My Story Matters Quotes

A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, "My story matters because I matter." A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn't. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we've convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster. Revolution ~ Brene Brown

Story humanizes the woman on the other end of the dollar. When we see the humanity in someone, it becomes difficult to sexualize and objectify them. ~ Harmony Dust

Once we have a true revelation that we are loved, valued, and purposed, it becomes difficult to live in such a way that contradicts this truth. ~ Harmony Dust

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. ~ Rumi

There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's. ~ Greg Van Eekhout

My Moms left the state and she doesn't stay in touch. Sometimes I wonder about her story, how she got to where she hated herself so much that she taught it to me. ~ Colette D. Winlock

I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me. ~ Michael Robotham

My dad has a story about hearing from me at work one day when I hadn't had a chance to call in a while. He picked up the phone and was surprised to hear my voice. He was even more surprised that I was whispering. "Chris, why is your voice so hushed?" he asked. "I'm on an op, Dad. I don't want them to know where I'm at." "Oh," he answered, a little shaken. ~ Chris Kyle

So your perfect proposal, what would it be?" Ben asks. "Seriously?" ... "I don't know. It would just be the two of us, and I guess I'd want him to say something honest, not overly romantic, not something that would make a great story to tell his friends. I'd just want him to lean over ... " As I say it, I lean slightly toward Ben, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body radiating into the empty space between us, and drop the volume of my voice. " ... and say 'Janelle Tenner, fucking marry me. ~ Elizabeth Norris

Wherever I go, I'll always see you. You'll always be with me. And there's no happy ending coming here, no way a story that started on a night that's burned into my heart will end the way I wish it could. You're really gone, no last words, and no matter how many letters I write to you, you're never going to reply. You're never going to say good-bye. So I will. Good-bye, Julia. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being you. ~ Elizabeth Scott

I've always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There's no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word. ~ Shannon Hale

In crime fiction, I just don't write the parts that aren't a thriller and it's exactly the same in my TV reporting - I distill the essence of the story until it's only the jewels of the tale - and leave in only the most compelling and exciting parts. ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan

I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same. ~ Isabel Allende

It is like a dream come true," he admitted. They had both dreamed of one another, but now it was real. Now it was flesh and reality, and he wished this night could last an eternity.
"Maybe you will write it one day…a story or a poem of a prince who desired his valet like his lungs yearned for air."
His heart thundered, grew, swelled within his chest. Yes, Cassius thought he would. He could immortalize them in words.
Cassius gasped when Merrick lowered to his knees to remove Cas's trousers and undergarments. His prick ached as it sprung free, and the prince leaned in, nudging his nose in the coarse hair at Cassius's groin.
"Merrick." Cassius twined his fingers in the prince's soft hair.
"You smell of my soap."
"I need you," Cassius replied.
"I am here. ~ Riley Hart

Hearken to my story. Listen but do not pity me. For pity is intended for the weak and I am still strong in my affliction. ~ Kahlil Gibran

I know what you must be thinking: What a bitch. And you'll get no argument from me on that one. I was pretty messed up back then. I loved Elias with all my head, and that scared the hell out of me.
But I should get something out of the way before I dive into the excuses of why I was the way I was. I'm sure Elias sugarcoated me with his bias and all, but if this story is going to be told, then it needs to be told in its truth and entirety, without Band-Aids and training wheels.
I was fucked up. ~ J.A. Redmerski

Independent films are very hard to get made, but I'm lucky enough to get them made, so I'm going to keep doing it. I like my independence. I like being able to tell a story the way I want to tell a story. I don't like developing it with a team. I like coming to a story and deciding whether I want to do it or not. ~ Paul Haggis

Check out my new story collection, The Cucumber King of Kedainiai, forthcoming in October 2013 with Subito Press! ~ Wendell Mayo

Any story is an ocean whose tide begins in a place I can't know, and my life is but a moment in that flood, my part in it only a mote in the flow. ~ Ned Hayes

I am, after all, not just the novel's creator but its first reader. And if I'm not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere. ~ Stephen King

She stole my first kiss, first love and all those first things, which are remembered just because they've never been before ~ Alice Walsh

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down. ~ Ruth Reichl

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer's block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gripped by fear of the blank sheet in front of me. It is infallible, and its effect is always the same: the knot unravels and a stream of words gushes out on to the virgin paper. It acts like a magic spell and I sometimes fancy it really is one. But, even if it isn't the work of a sorcerer, it is certainly the most brilliant sentence any writer has ever devised. It runs: 'This is where my story begins.' ~ Walter Moers

We're here to send you back to Hell where you belong," Tarren said, his eyes glinting dangerously. …Yeah, course he said that. Tarren is full of witty one-liners. He spends hours every night thinking them up and writing them down in his diary… No, I've seen it. It's pink and got little flowers all over it. …Oh, now that's just mean. Wait, you're making me laugh, I gotta keep going…. The story. Stop interrupting. I'm losing my place. ~ J. Bennett

I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality. ~ Emma Donoghue

The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect ... an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. ~ Julio Cortazar

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. ~ Amy Tan

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all ... There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything. ~ Michel De Certeau

Besides, my taste in porn has calmed down a lot since I was young. As a twenty-year-old, I resented any dialogue or attempt at a story whatsoever. I just wanted the sex. Now that I'm forty-four, I kind of want the story. Who are these two? How did they meet? Are they in love? Will the Japanese girl's parents approve of these three giant black guys? ~ Greg Fitzsimmons

We take those things we need
from the Confederates' abandoned homes:
salt, sugar, even this journal, near full
with someone else's words, overlapped now,
crosshatched beneath mine. On every page,
his story intersecting with my own. ~ Natasha Trethewey

'Story of My Life' was essentially a two-man musical play. In hindsight, I don't know if there was room for a two-man musical on Broadway. ~ Will Chase

The silhouettes of houses slipped past before I could catch them and remember the people we were leaving behind. In a couple of hours they would wake and find us gone, far away, so as not to remind them of their pain and what our family now meant to this town.
My name is Tom Brennan and this is my story. ~ J.C. Burke

When I started writing Forest Life, I was suicidal and drunk because I had lost someone I love to a tragedy. Afterward, my question was this: why love when death and suffering are inevitable? I won't reveal my solution to this problem, but I do present it in the pages of the book. These are only a few of the issues I grapple with in the story and I hope that you'll read the story and consciously address your own uncertainty and fear." - Shane Crash, Provoketive Magazine Write-Up 2012 ~ Shane Crash

My lips on your body trace the story of my love. ~ C.D. Reiss

Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches
of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars
we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend
once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones
we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me,
a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives,
our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope,
a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple
sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon. ~ Richard Jackson

And when I finished my story, Nesta merely stared at me for a long while before asking me to teach her how to paint. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I'm not just a reader or a writer; I inhale written words like they're my oxygen. It's not a hobby. It's a passion. People intrigue me. Life intrigues me. I see a story behind every pair of eyes I meet, history in every voice. I'll see someone wearing a smile and wonder what put it there. Words allow me to immerse myself in a whole other world. I get to become a different person. ~ Nicola Haken

Around 1980, I'd been writing short stories, all to no success; so I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and asked "How long should it take an aspiring writer to either get published or know when to give up?" Lo and behold, King wrote back to me in long hand with blue flair pen on 14-inch paper, purveying a very nice, helpful note; in it he said my letter proved a "command of the language," that I should never give up, and that it would take years to succeed, not months. "That's cold comfort but it's the truth." This was the ultimate encouragement for a young writer to be who didn't know shit about the market. I took Mr. King's advice and actually sold my first novel little more than a year later. I'll always be copiously grateful for this advice, and it's the same advice I give aspiring writers now (along with the story of King's reply!). ~ Edward Lee

Blood that was warm has now run cold
bled every day have hearts become old
Telling I am the story of my past
and of the ghosts at which it is aghast

Life as a child was a wonderful rhapsody
Free from the fetters of rational prosody
Naively making brute reality a parody
Revelling in a soul filled with life's melody

Poverty struck and child became destitute
wailing and whimpering like a wretched prostitute
Of pleasure and pain does a society constitute
for Man is not for God to substitute

Life is a parody of paradoxical Irony
Fate rules not without a touch of Tyranny
While the rich belch on their goblets of honey
the wretched etch on the tablets of agony ~ Prabhukrishna M