Teaching Story Quotes

Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: 'What did you do that?' Junaid said: 'I was bowing before his single-mindedness. For his aim, that man has given his life. ~ Idries Shah

Accept nothing. Challenge everything. ~ A.D. Posey

One of the illnesses that often afflicts leaders is myopia. We begin to think that the story we are living and writing is the story. We become laser focused on our own goals, accomplishments, and responsibilities. But a habit of faith takes the pressure off. It reminds you that there is a bigger story of which yours is only one part. It allows us to stop worrying about what others are saying about us and instead consider what God might be saying to us. ~ Brad Lomenick

Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. ~ Kobo Abe

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there. ~ Vincente Minnelli

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story. ~ Jeanne Moreau

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. ~ John Berendt

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. ~ Zadie Smith

I always believed that the picture itself should tell the story. ~ Brian Froud

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am. ~ Flea

The story of Reginald Watts was a luckless one dealing in every manner of failure and catastrophe, though he spoke of this without bitterness or regret, and in fact seemed to find humor in his numberless missteps: 'I've failed at straight business, I've failed at criminal enterprise, I've failed at love, I've failed at friendship. You name it, I've failed at it. Go ahead and name something. Anything at all. ~ Patrick DeWitt

In a really good thrift store you feel like you're in a room with all of these stories, and it's up to you to go and find the stories that you want to bring home with you. And then when you wear the clothes, they help you tell a new story, but they're bringing that old part with them and with you and you're benefiting from that in a way that you can't even really understand. ~ Kate Scelsa

I do three things. I do teaching, I do conducting and I do playing. And each one of those sort of helps the other. ~ Itzhak Perlman

No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements. ~ John Truby

A tale can start in many ways. Thus, it is many tales, and at the same time each of these is but one way of telling the same story. ~ Juliet Marillier

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece. ~ Christopher Moore

No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She'd been wrong about everything. She'd entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag. ~ N.D. Wilson

Nasty little dragon. It wouldn't happen again. He was St George and he would slay the dragon. That was how it worked, wasn't it? He knew the story. He was a hero, a patron saint. He was England. This country was his. His people were marching towards him from all corners. He would take his throne. But first he had to destroy the dragon. He would butcher him like a piece of meat; a long pig, that's all he was: cutlets, chops, ribs and chitterlings. He would make sausages out of him, ha, because in the end he was nothing more than a side of pork ... No, smaller than that. He was just a lamb. A leg of lamb. Yes. He would slaughter the lamb. ~ Charlie Higson

But this, too, you could say, is part of the American story, as we have always been people who move on, leaving behind wreckage and fragments in our wake. ~ Colin Dickey

I asked the Dalai Lama what it was like to wake up with joy, and he shared his experience each morning. 'I think if you are an intensely religious believer, as soon as you wake up, you thank God for another day. And you try to do God's will. For a nontheist like myself, but who is a Buddhist, as soon as I wake up, I remember Buddha's teaching: the importance of kindness and compassion, wishing something good for others, or at least to reduce their suffering. Then I remember that everything is interrelated, the teaching of interdependence. So then I set my intention for the day: that this day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That's a meaningful day. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

It's weird how a whole life can be distilled into a series of moments, and how, without thinking, we order those moments into a story that makes sense and seems to mean something. We are endless editors of our own histories. But sometimes we get it wrong ~ Keith Stuart

Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer. ~ Jonas Salk

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. ~ Lorin Stein

Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, proliferations, endings of the line, until there is death. Well, no. I have a wonderful, fond memory, about love and trust and books. ~ Renata Adler

I don't know what story y'all trying to get out of me. I don't know what image y'all trying to portray of me. But it don't matter what y'all think, what y'all say about me because when I go home at night, the same people that I look in the face - my family that I love, that's all that really matter to me. ~ Marshawn Lynch

Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story. ~ Refaat Alareer

By teaching twenty-something year olds responsible debt management practices, we can help them create a balanced lifestyle and find peace of mind through increased financial awareness, smart saving and long-term investing. ~ Alexa Von Tobel

No one can hurt you without teaching a life's lesson. So accept it with love and kindness. ~ Debasish Mridha

His story also demonstrates an obscure truth. Having a plan, any plan, means you know on some level you're going to fail, you're in the wrong. This contradicts everything I've been taught, all the larger principles of modern life, which are all about planning and calculation. But if you're going to success, how could you need to think it out beforehand? If you had the necessary confidence--in every case perfect, unbreakable confidence--the idea of a plan would make you laugh. ~ Sam Munson

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story. ~ Jim Lehrer