Reading Stories Quotes

Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives. ~ Alexia Casale

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself. ~ Alice Hoffman

Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. ~ Kelly Link

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you. ~ Jincy Willett

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories."
"One could say that of all stories, younger brother. ~ G. Willow Wilson

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth. ~ Mike Carey

Stories are the only things that can ever really change the world. ~ Rowan Coleman

Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience. ~ BatWhaleDragon

I just LOVE reading stories about vampires! I can't get enough of them! ~ Nyx

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories. ~ Haruki Murakami

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David. ~ John Connolly

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story. ~ Willa Cather

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger

You know what it's like to *lose* yourself in a story. We have brother and sister *souls*. ~ Mike Carey

It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end. ~ Katherine Rundell

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter - an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect - a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind. ~ Jacob Weisberg

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
(A Teller of Tales) ~ W.B.Yeats

Bombs are falling and we're reading stories, I thought. I have entered the realm of the insane. -Jacob ~ Ransom Riggs

A writer concocts a different story for every reader. ~ Mike Bryan

A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well. ~ Deanna Vasquez

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story. ~ Amy Engel

Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories. ~ Jason Aaron

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories. ~ Dan Chaon

Only humans could write such pain and love, could make her swoon one minute and cry the next over something that had never really happened to people who'd never really existed. ~ Megan Shepherd

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead. ~ Ian McEwan

There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words ... ~ Lindsay Eland

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. ~ Hilary Mantel

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories. ~ Ben Okri

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.
(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892) ~ A.E. Housman

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment. ~ Sei Shonagon

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories. ~ Roy Conli

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over. ~ Dale Archer

You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?'
'Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.'
'Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?'
'A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?'
'Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'
And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End. ~ Lucy Adlington

I read individual stories a lot in magazines and other places, too, but I really think there's something to be said for reading story collections as collections. That's not true of all story collections, to be honest, but for good ones I think it often is true. ~ Brian Evenson

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the stories she wrote as a seven year old in Nigeria were based on the kinds of stories she read, featuring characters who were white and blue eyed, they played in the snow, the ate apples. According to Adichie, this wasn´t just about experimentation or an active imagination, because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories such as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, english and middle class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material.
Adichie describes this as "The danger of a single story" a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be diverse, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination ~ Darren Chetty

How you feel after reading something indicates not what you've read but where you are at. ~ A.D. Posey

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another ... ~ Diane Duane

The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book. ~ A.D. Posey

I really like reading stories with an unreliable narrator, because the person telling you what happened can't be trusted with the facts and you have to figure it out.
Maybe when it's your own story, you're always going to be an unreliable narrator" -Avery (Night Owl) ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

Stories are the wealth of humanity! ~ Pierce Brown

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra. ~ Neil Gaiman

We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it. ~ Mark Strand

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. ~ Nina Sankovitch

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly. ~ Johnny Rich

I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone. ~ Simon Van Booy

Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable... ~ Stephen King

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come. ~ Susan Orlean

What I notice, as a historian reading stories about so-called nature miracles, the walking on the water, or the miraculous catch of fishes, they're done especially for the insiders, for the disciples. Usually healings and exorcisms are done for people along the road, as it were. Jesus doesn't come on the water to save the fishing fleet from Capernaum, he comes on the water to save the disciples. It's a parable, dummy, it's a parable, don't you get it? If the leadership of the church takes off in a boat without Jesus, it will sink, it will get nowhere. ~ John Dominic Crossan

Stories can start revolutions. ~ Katherine Rundell

Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a "turn of the page," I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32) ~ Lionel Shriver

I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak. ~ Sarah Jio

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story. ~ Alberto Manguel

A reading appetite is quirky, singular, and essential ~ Penny Kittle

Sunset's Passions," he read, and opened the book to a random page to read aloud. "'His hands gently caressed her ivory, silky br- " His eyes widened. "By the Wyrd! Do you actually read this rubbish? What happened to Symbols of Power and Eyllwe Customs and Culture?"
...
"You may borrow it when I'm done. If you read it, your literary experience will be complete. And," she added with a coy smile, "it will give you some creative ideas of things to do with your lady friends. ~ Sarah J. Maas

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?"

"I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"

Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."

"Oh…yes…" said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."

"No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more. ~ Alberto Manguel

The stories teach them valuable life lessons. That good things happen to bad people. That it's possible to make a bad situation even worse if you don't think it through. That parents are clueless except when they're not. That it's good to try new things even when a new thing is kind of disgusting, because new experiences make you a well-rounded person. That art can be transcendent. That lust is all-powerful, that drugs are fun, and that not everyone who does them is a loser. That losing people is part of life. That where comedy goes, tragedy isn't far behind. That everyone has issues with their bodies, but some take it too far, almost to death. That fear can be exhilarating. That boys are assholes. That it's important to look forward and never look back ... ~ Megan McCafferty

Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system. ~ A. J. Jacobs

Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought. ~ Lawrence Durrell

You know how the best story angles often spring from that thought you have on reading an article or watching a show - that thought you have before the responsible journalist in you comes up with something boring. I usually recommend people get in touch with their deep 'reptilian brain.' ~ Nick Denton

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel. ~ Edwin Muir

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights) ~ Peter Carlaftes

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. ~ Anne Michaels

I think I always knew I would be a writer some day, but it wasn't until I was grown and had children of my own that I turned to telling Native American stories. ~ Joseph Bruchac

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together." ~ Etgar Keret

My activities tend to revolve around crossword puzzles, reading and playing piano and games with my friends. ~ Rashida Jones

When I was 8, I was reading 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and all that, not knowing it wasn't my reading level. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Not exactly what the world was looking for, a musical on 'Don Quixote.' It was required reading in high school. ~ Mitch Leigh

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really. ~ Jacqueline Kelly

I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It's not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It's about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It's about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged. ~ Maira Kalman

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book. ~ Groucho Marx

The situation was saved; Brisbane was going to tell a story. ~ Francis Marion Crawford

She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation. ~ Michael Cunningham

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. ~ Werner Herzog

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal. ~ Dave Eggers

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all. ~ William Dean Howells

Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view. ~ Trent Dalton

And I really have done everything that I said I did do. The rest is just a story that somebody else made up. ~ Lana Del Rey

Without question, of the heterosexual men that I've spoken to over the years, that's usually - they say, you know, my favorite thing you've ever done was Linda or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of very feminine, recessive kind of personality. So they fell in love with her, but they didn't feel the story through her body. ~ Meryl Streep

Bad decisions create a good lessons, photos however create a good stories. ~ Solita

I love stories about women. ~ Clint Eastwood

The idea that we live in a post-modern culture is a myth. In fact a post-modern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. Nobody is a post-modernist when it comes to reading the labels on a medicine bottle versus a box of rat poison! You better believe that texts have objective meaning! ~ William Lane Craig

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. ~ Ian McEwan

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories. ~ Leslie Marmon Silko

I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.' ~ Candace Bushnell

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. ~ Janet Fitch

I can't talk about foreign policy like anyone who's spent their life reading and learning foreign policy. But as a citizen in a democracy, it's very important that I participate in that. ~ Ron Silver

Reading books exposes us to the consistency and uniqueness of being human. Book reading is an investigatory process. We read books in order to encounter the orchestrated words that describe emotions and observations that we too have experienced but are unable to glean the right alignment of words that fully embody the resonance that we seek. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Our lives are our stories,
each day a fresh new page,
each season a whole new chapter.
Our parenting chapters become
the beginning of our children's stories
in glorious, dog-eared, mud-stained,
daisy-chain pages of sunshine-filled
days and wish-on-a-star nights and
shared struggles and triumphs
and tears and laughter.
Where their stories go from
there is up to them,
but where they begin is up to us. ~ L.R. Knost

The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress. ~ Nigel Hamilton

The clichés are, of course, disguised; essentially, they are the same throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it spans the universe or the living room. They are like those 'assorted' cookies that differ from one another only in shape and shade. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

All of the good, weird stories I've written are based on things I've dredged out of my subconscious. That's the real stuff. Everything else is fake. ~ Ray Bradbury

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist. ~ David McCullough

But at home he was our humorous, kind, and wise Dad. He loved reading, and he loved including the whole family in his discoveries. He ~ Ji-li Jiang

It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me. ~ Lucy Corin

I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument. ~ Edward R. Murrow