The Stories We Tell Quotes

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. ~ Bill Lambrecht

We always think of language as an immovable object, as this set of codified and unbreakable rules. But when you consider that one can rearrange the
letters in PRESBYTERIANS and spell
BRITNEY SPEARS, it reminds us that
language (and the stories we tell with
language) can be twisted and molded. ~ John Green

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you. ~ Nora Raleigh Baskin

If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.

Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference. ~ Jay Woodman

And fairy tales are make-believe. They are the stories we tell to small children to make them believe the world is a far better place than it really is. ~ J.L. Vallance

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about...

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s. ~ Damian Barr

Not only does art imitate life but life imitates art. Perhaps we not only learn about life from stories, perhaps we make our lives through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us. ~ Ramona Koval

Five hundred and fifty generations have lived here. Only the stories we tell each other will create us as a true Canadian people. ~ Rudy Wiebe

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths. ~ Ken Liu

I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it? ~ Peter Orner

The stories we tell have power, of course. But the stories that go untold have just as much power ~ Sabaa Tahir

Reality is always kinder than the stories we tell about it. ~ Byron Katie

The stories we tell ourselves have great power. ~ Danielle Teller

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? ~ Saidiya V. Hartman

We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Tony Robbins

The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. ~ Jessica Jackley

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. ~ Charles Duhigg

We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect. ~ John N. Gray

I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I ~ Daniel Abraham

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Grant Morrison

Stories matter. The stories we tell about each other. The stories you end up telling yourself. ~ J.C. Geiger

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Gina Greenlee

As with any other great force of nature, there is both glory and danger in the stories we tell ourselves. Some are toxic and keep our problems festering. Others are tonic and bring us beyond the limitations of our previous history. To be in a life of our own definition, we must be able to discover which stories we are following and determine which ones help us grow the most interesting possibilities. ~ Dawna Markova

THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry - lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness - plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night. ~ Joshilyn Jackson

Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. ~ Sam Keen

Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we din't know how to listen to one another. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Rather than going after these walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them, and smell them and get to know them well. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build these walls: what are the stories we tell ourselves? What repels me and what attracts me? Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic or uptight about the investigation. Year after year, we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever arises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem to widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely. ~ Pema Chodron

History is the stories we tell about the past. ~ Thomas King

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Shekhar Kapur

Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe. ~ Matthew D. Lieberman

That's the rub about 'Community' - for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don't show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Rob Sheffield

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth. ~ Alexandra Curry

So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed. ~ Jonathan Sacks

In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does. ~ Sam Keen

I sometimes wonder how much of our life is rooted in the imagination, in the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to make sense of what has happened along the way. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

FABULA and SYUZHET. As defined by the film historian and theorist David Bordwell, the syuzhet is essentially the film's plot - it's the specific ordering of narrative elements within the film. The fabula, however, is more than simply the story being told; it's the story that each of us constructs as we watch and hear the syuzhet unfold. It's all the story material presented by the filmmaker, but it's also the story material and associations we bring to the film as individuals - the stories we tell ourselves based on the stories we are being told. ~ Ed Sikov

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us. ~ Rabih Alameddine

The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow. ~ Ananda Braxton-Smith

How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should super-cede them. ~ Stephanie Danler

What if we are all capable of lying to ourselves? But the story didn't bother Naomi. Instead it reassured her confirming that the stories we tell ourselves have more meaning than the facts. That doesn't make them lies. Seeded with every myth was the emotional truth. ~ Rene Denfeld

When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow. ~ Mark Manson

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true. ~ Julian Barnes

Outside of the courtroom, in the dialogues we engage in and the discussions we have, we should be asking ourselves continually whether the stories we tell divide or unite. If we are casting ourselves collectively as victims, to what end are we doing so? Is there a way in which this is seemingly entitling us to collectively diminish others or to sanction acts that we wouldn't otherwise feel entitled to endorse? ~ Eliott Behar

Nothing matters more than the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world. ~ Mike Carey

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Keep your Eyes on All that's Good and Beautiful and Possible in the World. Because "The Stories We Tell Create the People We Become. ~ Jacqueline Lewis

A distorted sense of danger isn't just psychologically taxing; it also encourages us to perceive risk where there isn't any. Steeping in ominous stories can make people into threats themselves. The news is full of examples of how ambient anxiety gets turned against people of color going about their daily lives - taking a nap in the student lounge; walking down the street; selling lemonade. I thought of the woman who called the cops on two Native American brothers who were on a college tour at Colorado State. The teenagers made the woman "nervous," she told the 911 operator. "If it's nothing, I'm sorry. But it actually made me like feel sick and I've never felt like that." Many people are feeling sick these days, for many reasons. But we should all be careful about the stories we tell ourselves to explain why. ~ Rachel Monroe

We get so used to the stories we tell about ourselves. This is why we sometimes need to find ourselves in the stories of others. ~ Leslie Jamison

We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. ~ Mark Doty

The greatest works of poetry are the stories we tell about ourselves. ~ Tara Conklin

The world we build tomorrow is born in the stories we tell our children today. Politics moves the pieces. Education changes the game. ~ Jonathan Sacks

We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going. ~ Edmund Campion

Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. ~ John Green

Still, the night feels restless underneath me ~ Patti Callahan Henry

Because the new the stories we tell, the art we make, the rockets we build, will influence the future that shapes our present. ~ Natasha Tsakos

My films are just stories, but that's all we have, the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. When you talk to the elderly, men and women at the end of their lives, you see that's what's left behind as the body disintegrates. Our stories. Our children will decide whether or not to keep telling them. ~ Marisha Pessl

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all. ~ Brent Weeks

For we were not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts; in the stories we tell of ourselves we were not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and - yes - conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent. ~ Mohsin Hamid

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. ~ Rebecca Solnit

it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused. ~ Nell Zink

The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives. ~ Alex Lemon

A lot of things just got distorted, like stories about each other. After the tour we never talked. I believe a band should be a band. ~ Tommy Bolin

It is, of course, much easier for a literary character to take a risk for love. The realities of social strata and responsibility mean nothing but a plot point in today's modern literature, but outside of these stories we are not pushing for change. The ideals we embody in our art rarely play themselves out in our lives. What would happen if we took the example of our fictional heroes; what if each of us was a Don Juan? ~ Evelyn Pryce

This was not what we wanted to hear that morning. Adventures inspire, tall tales excite, and fantasies stir the imagination, but sad stories seldom ever buoy the spirit. We all paused to take in the sad news. ~ J.W. Lord

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories? ~ Todd Gitlin

We give people political labels, sexual labels, and religious labels. But in the process, we strip them of their individuality and complexity. Prejudice is pre-judging. It's assuming that bad stories end badly, but Jesus is in the business of turning bad beginnings into happily ever afters.
...
God cannot give up on you. It's not in His nature. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. All you have to do is turn around. All you have to do is crash the party! ~ Mark Batterson

Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere-the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are-from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the planet itself had felt something missing, and at the tap of mind against rock, noosphere against lithosphere, the absent biosphere had sprung into the gap with the startling suddenness of a magician's paper flower ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people - a great many people - who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better. ~ Anne Ursu

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

Everyone has a story. It is what defines us. Our stories continue to change as we evolve in-and-out of our own skin, changing and manipulating the world around us. ~ Brandon Garic Notch

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

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. ~ Walter Benjamin

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe. ~ Adam Kirsch

Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people's lives. The stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very "universal" human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others. The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen as limited and particular. ~ Brittney Cooper

The truth about stories is, that's all we are. ~ Thomas King

We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college "adult" person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I'd become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that's when life will really begin.
And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about "The Big Moment" – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that ~ Shauna Niequist

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring. ~ Laz Alonso

Evolutionists ... have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door ~ Richard Lewontin

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled.

It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.

"A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"

I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Since you and your brain (and mine too) are biased to seeing patterns even where there are no patterns we have to be very careful to be rational. Facts are not always convenient. Nor are they always warm and fuzzy. Often they do not fit our stories of the way things are. And if we ignore them we try to fool nature, and nature cannot be fooled. ~ Richard Feynman

I'd once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They're not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative. ~ Ken Ilgunas

Many of us spent time talking with the men and women who had lived through Katrina, and we heard stories of not only individual sacrifice and loss, but also of neighbors taking care of neighbors. The power of community was so evident in New Orleans. ~ Howard Schultz

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

Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London ~ Petina Gappah

Everyone's talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don't think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.
If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that's what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren't going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Why do you look?" I mutter.
I half expect Magiano to tease me, spitting back one of his sarcastic phrases. But he doesn't smile. "We are drawn to stories," he says in a soft voice, "and every scar carries one." He lifts a hand and places his palm gently against the ruined side of my face, covering the scar.
I look down, embarrassed now. Instinctively, I reach up to brush some of my hair over my face - only to remember that I no longer have long locks.
"Hiding it makes you more beautiful," Magiano says. Then he takes his hand away, exposing my scar again. "But revealing it makes you you." He nods at me. "So wear it proudly. ~ Marie Lu

To bury something, it is often considered, either means the end of something or the passing on into the realm of the earth or the sky, only the dead could ever know. But it is not only the dead that we bury. We bury objects, memories, thoughts and emotions among other things. Contrary to popular belief burying something is not the end of it because even though it is suppressed beneath layers of earth or self control, the dead and buried don't always remain that way and that is where the stories come from, the stories that haunt us for the rest of our no longer carefree lives. ~ Shitij Sharma

None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. ~ Margaret Atwood

I think the Bible is largely an amazing and beautiful book of fictional stories from which we can glean the most wholesome lessons about how to treat one another decently. ~ Nick Offerman

There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land. Kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant, and it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canapes of forests and in the gentle roll of hills. A song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks. They are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands some day. You'll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes....' Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes... She knew precisely what I meant. She understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment. ~ Kevin Hearne

Studies [on the origin of fairy-stories] are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested.

...with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: 'We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.'

Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When we were small, Rose and I used to play a game called connect the dots. I loved it. I loved drawing a line from dot number 1 to dot number 2 and so on. Most of all, I loved the moment when the chaotic sprinkle of dots resolved itself into a picture.
That's what stories do. They connect the random dots of life into a picture. But it's all an illusion. Just try to connect the dots of life. You'll end up with a lunatic scribble. ~ Franny Billingsley

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I've always been a firm believer that love conquers all and that every woman's experience is a story in itself. Life is a never-ending journey and my imagination and experiences have inspired me to write powerful stories. Although my books are fiction, my goal is to offer compelling lessons about life and love. The message I wish to convey to my readers is that despite the many challenges we face in this world, we must have hope and faith. Overall, it is love that binds us together. ~ Geraldine Solon

Without language we have no past, the present is unquantifiable, and we lack a means to recognize and express the paradoxical future challenges of humanity. In absence of a shared language, we cannot understand prior generation's conflicts, desires, and achievements, nor can we communicate with future generations our essential values and the wisdom we garner through undergoing our own socioeconomic crises ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility. ~ Benito Mussolini