Own Stories Quotes

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid ... initially and my own stories. ~ Peter Morgan

I have my own stories. A few are known and some untold. Be a tragic one or a comedy one, stories are meant to end at a certain point. Stories ... teach us whether we are the option or we are comparing. ~ Upasana Banerjee

If we don't tell our own stories, we'll never take control of the narrative. ~ Julie Clark

We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption. ~ Suzanne Rindell

Everything in life is made up ... You make up that you are happy. You make up that you are sad. You make up that you are in love. If you don't make up your own life, who's going to make it up for you? It's bad enough when you die and everybody can make up their own stories about you.
- Mr. Hooft ~ Walter Dean Myers

At the end of the day, my life isn't about other people's work. I've got to stop giving stuff away. I've got my own stories to tell, and a great need to tell them. I've got these images, these thoughts in my head, and I need to find a way to cope with them. ~ Paddy Considine

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you. ~ Neil Gaiman

After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They've been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans - they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and then they're content. ~ Karen Lord

I scroll through my own stories in my phone, the ones I write when I can't sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination. ~ Caroline Kepnes

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Ford considers that development journalism means getting behind the cliches of starving children and getting people to tell their own stories: "We are looking at big policies affecting developing countries and looking at how this relates on the ground to those who expect to be benefiting. ~ Anonymous

We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact. ~ Robert Stone

Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

Simona: Truth doesn't exist?
Katie: ...because everyone's got their own side of a story
...If there's no real truth, then all we can do is offer up our own stories and listen to other people's and try and make sense of it all ~ Jenny Downham

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am. ~ John Marsden

Until lions start writing down their own stories, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. - AFRICAN PROVERB ~ Ellen Bass

We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off. ~ Erykah Badu

Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories. ~ Pam Allyn

Just when we think we have our own stories figured out, heroes arise in the most unexpected places. ~ Camron Wright

Missouri would have convinced you that we did not exist if it were not for social media. The intensity with which they responded to protestors very early - we were able to document that and share it quickly with people in a way that we never could have without social media. We were able to tell our own stories. The history of blackness is also a history of erasure. Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional. So what was powerful in the context of Ferguson is that there were many people able to tell their story as the story unfolded. ~ Anonymous

And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one. ~ Mark Ravenhill

America is an unlikely place - a country built on defiance of the odds; on a belief in the impossible. And I remind you of this because as you set out to live your own stories of success and achievement, it's now your turn to help keep it this way. ~ Barack Obama

I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I'm not interested in controlling others but I'm invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don't do many face-to-face interviews. I don't like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I'm the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be. ~ Diriye Osman

I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters. ~ Georgie Henley

To do that Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that he could not reach with his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in attempt to recreate the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answers to this question as soon as succeed in telling the story. ~ Haruki Murakami

My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history. ~ Jennifer Beals

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience. ~ Bill Moyers

These 'mistakes' occur in my books for a reason. I have an agenda: I'm secretly trying to inspire kids to create their own stories and comics, and I don't want them to feel stifled by 'perfectionism.' ~ Dav Pilkey

Seeing 'Pretty Little Liars' fans adapt and create their own stories is both exciting and flattering, and I think what Amazon Publishing is offering through Kindle Worlds is a great way to reward their ingenuity. ~ Sara Shepard

Taylor is a musician who does things under her own name and tells her own stories-her songs and her albums are her. ~ Emma Stone

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents' house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer. ~ Sahara Sanders

We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to.

We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers.

And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own.

If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us.

We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special.

We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread.

We have friends who lend us their favorite books.

Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears.

All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes.

Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own. ~ Lois Lowry

If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

With my guitar, I could write my own stories, my own poems, and my own destiny. No one could take away the feelings, the emotions or the truth of my notes. They could hide secrets and provoke images of words that never should be whispered. I could compose the melody of my aching heart and write into it my own happily ever after since no one seemed to think after all my suffering I deserved one. That's okay, I would make my own. ~ Christine Zolendz

Where do storytellers find the wisdom to discover their own stories? From no place more mysterious than their own hearts. ~ Marion Dane Bauer

The longer the silence remains untouched the longer the miscommunication creates its own stories. ~ Christina Strigas

The thought was sobering. How many people's motives didn't match up with what I'd taken for their actions? How many villains were the heroes of their own stories? I didn't know, and I was terribly afraid that I was never going to find out. ~ Mira Grant

Delilah Bard never read many books.
The few she did had pirates and thieves, and always ended with freedom and the promise of more stories. Characters sailed away. They lived on. Lila always imagined people that way, a series of intersections and adventures. It was easy when you moved through life--through worlds--the way she did. Easy when you didn't care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head. ~ V.E Schwab

There are always folk in need of other folk to flesh out their own stories. They need others to join in before they can believe in anything at all. They commonly get about in crowds and ten to ganging up. ~ Ananda Braxton-Smith

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sometimes, being a little selfish is the biggest act of self-love we can give ourselves. expanse you are not just a person, and you don't simply exist. you are a culmination of everything you've ever seen and heard, loved and hated, feared and not. you are the sum of every action and reaction, failure and success, mistake and apology, every interaction with another, like and unlike yourself. we are all complex beings with our own stories and our own perspectives. and we all deserve to love and be loved just the same. ~ Cyrus Parker

We don't often see our own stories. Good artists are the ones that whisper our own stories back to us. ~ Tori Amos

What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay. ~ Barbara Mikulski

Isn't it boring ... how people always want to tell you their own stories instead of listening to yours? I suppose that's why psychiatrists are better than friends; the paid listener doesn't interrupt with his own experiences. ~ Helen Van Slyke

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories. ~ Teju Cole

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew. ~ Sarah Polley

But we're all characters in our own stories, Iggy. ~ Kate Klise

Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you'll have a happy life. ~ Dean Koontz

The tabloids create their own stories about people's lives that don't exist. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate. ~ Shawna Yang Ryan

When we, any of us who have been transformed by Christ, tell our own stories, we're telling the story of who God is. ~ Shauna Niequist

I remember that there is no right answer. There are only stories to tell. Every day the world will tell my girls its story about sexiness and what it means to be a woman. My girls need to hear my story. Not so my story will become theirs, but so they'll understand that they are free to write their own stories. They need to know that much of what the world presents to them is not truth, it's poison. And my girls will only be able to detect lies if they know what truth sounds like. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

I would dearly love to read the reactions, the observations of each and every person who walks through the gates of Le Cirque des Reves, to know what they see and hear and feel. To see how their experience overlaps with my own and how it differs. I have been fortunate letters with such information, to have reveurs share with me writings from journals or thoughts scribbled on scraps of paper.
We add our own stories, each visitor, each visit each night spent at the circus. I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared. -Friedrick Thiessen, 1895 ~ Erin Morgenstern

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. ~ Virginia Woolf

It's extremely important for women to be writing their own stories and giving them to people to really be emotionally impacted by ~ Rosario Dawson

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key. ~ Phil Klay

It was a worrying trend. Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories were woven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum. But what was Plum's story? ~ Lev Grossman

And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap. ~ Jandy Nelson

Isn't it amazing how we always have to put our mark on things? And how, from the natural world, we find evidence over and over again that reminds us, not so much of the birds, but of our own stories and our own kinds of art? ~ Rosamond Purcell

We're all the heroes of our own stories. So, when I am inside the head of a character who would otherwise be considered a villain, I have a great deal of affection for that character and I'm trying to see the world and the events through their eyes. ~ George R R Martin

Technique does not need to be interpreted. It interprets itself. You have to choose the right objects and focus on them precisely and they will tell you their own stories. ~ Albert Renger-Patzsch

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories. ~ Mark Slouka

I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest. ~ John Darnielle

He admired writers whose own stories were as interesting as the ones they wrote. ~ Adam Langer

I can write my own stories and I can write myself in. ~ Octavia Butler

sometimes the very best thing to do, I find, is to turn off the news and keep writing our own stories and lullabies. ~ Shauna Niequist

Personal style isn't simply an exercise in parroting but rather an exhibition for our own stories - from the gait of our walk to the rhythm of our speech to the manner in which the necktie falls from the knot. ~ LZ Granderson

Great characters tell their own stories. The author just writes it down for them. ~ Molly Evangeline

I believe young female directors in particular should always remind themselves of the truths of their own stories and not let outsiders influence the authenticity of their films. ~ Shahad Ameen

The way he said it spoke of an ache I recognized. I knew that no matter how similar they were, no two losses were the same, but despite his loss being from a different circumstance, I felt his sadness as my own. We sat there in silence with my hand resting in his. My bandage told its own stories while we remembered the girl who taught Randolf such a valuable lesson about the small turning into the large. ~ J.D. Brewer

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books. ~ Orhan Pamuk

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell. ~ Michael Ondaatje

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories. ~ Washington Irving

I've always loved books. I was an avid reader, with any number of my own stories rolling around in my head. Writing them down seemed a logical step. ~ Kat Martin

Encourage children to write their own stories, and then don't rain on their parade. Don't say, 'That's not true.' Applaud flights of fantasy. Help with spelling and grammar, but stand up and cheer the use of imagination. ~ Gail Carson Levine

I'm a New Zealand actor, and I really want to be doing our stuff here, and our stuff includes plays from overseas. In terms of survival, maybe I should have taken a shot elsewhere at some point, but it gets back to the same theme - we should have our own people telling our own stories. ~ Peter Hambleton

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. ~ Elena Ferrante

We all tell our own stories the way we live our lives. My story is: Life is too short to not believe in fresh voices. I don't have Hollywood stars. I have great American artists. ~ Kevin McCollum

I would have my own stories from the island that, for so long, had been an heirloom I couldn't touch. ~ Nina Moreno

I wasn't the only one drifting between two worlds. Each of them had their own secrets, their own stories that nobody else believed. Was there a single being onboard who could honestly say they'd never fallen in love with a fairy or a banished prince? We were all the same. Stories create us. ~ Timothee De Fombelle

I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories. ~ Hannah Kent

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ~ Alberto Manguel

I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don't think it's necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories. ~ Michael Kenna

Instead of worship or ignorance of the past, we must make our own tools, our own stories, and our own legends. ~ Curious George Brigade

The recounting of a life is a cheat ... even our own stories are obscenely distorted ... ~ Carol Shields

At the age of three, Tito Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed with severe autism, but his mother, Soma, refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time that her son would be unable to interact with the outside world. She read to him, taught him to write in English, and challenged him to write his own stories. ~ Temple Grandin

Rapport-Building Stories People who have gone through tough situations will feel better after talking about it. If you share your tough stories, it may remind the listener of a similar scenario, and he may want to share his stories as well. It is a great way to get people to open up and encourage them to share their own stories. Also, if you can relate to a person's story and share your own story, that is powerful for creating a connection and building rapport. An advantage of telling rapport-building stories is that it does make people feel better, and it also forges new friendships. Often, we can be reluctant to share stories because we don't want to be too vulnerable, but once we do, we can enrich the lives of those who hear our stories. It is difficult not to be appreciative of a person after learning their story. ~ Matt Morris

Humankind's perpetual affinity for telling stories that depict the weal of life shapes and reflects human consciousness. Stories are the most ancient form of art. All societies, from the tribes scratching the earliest cave drawings, employed the art of storytelling. We hunger to hear other people's stories and to tell our own stories to an appreciative audience. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories. ~ Kyo Maclear

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra. ~ Mira Nair

They thought they were so different, Flame and Ice. Enemies always do. The Soviets and the West, they were the same. They looked at each other and saw monsters; they looked at themselves and saw men. But Jordan stood on the outside and knew them each for both monsters and men, the good and the bad bleeding together. They were only villains and heroes in their own stories. ~ Cassandra Rose Clarke

We contained our own stories. A thousand tiny parts of the story would die with us. ~ Alwyn Hamilton

If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will. ~ Mira Nair

We are all carriers of our own stories. We have never trusted our own voices. Reforms came, but we don't make them. They were presented by people removed from schools, by 'experts'. Such changes bi passes school. School by school changes, however slow, could make a powerful difference. ~ Deborah Meier

Because how dare we write our own stories, in our own voices?' CaZZ answers.

'True that,' Tanya says.

'Banning our books would be their way of erasing us, of making us - and the world we live in - invisible,' CaZZ says. ~ R. Zamora Linmark

It's easy to allow the world to collapse down to our own stories. To see ourselves as the central figure in the only story worth knowing and forget that every person we encounter is living their own, is the center of their own universe. But that's the nature of the human experience. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

I love telling stories; I always have, and I think women need to be more proactive about telling their own stories and sharing their points of view. ~ Dylan Penn

You are your own journey. ~ A.D. Posey