Stories They Tell Quotes

#1. It is its own form of conversation
you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.

David Levithan

#2. People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

Ben Okri

#3. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

Chuck Palahniuk

#4. People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

Elie Wiesel

#5. Companies thrive on the basis of the stories they tell.

Jay Abraham

#6. My daughters are in kindergarten and second grade, so many of the stories they tell, write, or illustrate are about each other and our dog, Buster.

Doreen Cronin

#7. People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.

Neil Gaiman

#8. All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.

Peggy Noonan

#9. A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it's moorings or orientation ... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

Ben Okri

#10. Can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean. She

David Levithan

#11. People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon

#12. There is no symbolism to these fish, as Hemingway wrote. A cabezon is just a cabezon; a garibaldi, a garibaldi. But what wonderful stories they tell us about life in the ocean!

Susan J. Tweit

#13. Directors go their whole career without being able to tell personal stories and to work with a cast as talented as they are.

Christian Bale

#14. A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.

John Dos Passos

#15. I wish I could anticipate some of the stories and lies that will be told. It's going to be great to get everyone together so we can tell all of the families, all of the wives and children, just how good we were because they never got to see us play.

Larry Conley

#16. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#17. They had once sworn to tell each other everything, absolutely everything, and after they had done that, after they had tested how much truth the other could tolerate, their stories had become the walls and the roof that held their home together.

Jo Nesbo

#18. The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

Catherine McCormack

#19. I try to tell a lot of stories to make my students aware that the world is a very cool place with many problems that need solving, and that they all can help solve them.

Sarah Parcak

#20. I will tell you something about stories ... They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

Leslie Marmon Silko

#21. My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.

Meg Cabot

#22. There are stories I'd like to tell, I'd like to see, and they're not getting made. These stories are beyond the experience of the people in power. They don't understand it, so they're frightened of it.

Randa Haines

#23. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Nick Earls

#24. I've done so many movies with first-time directors, and honestly I just go with gut instinct. People that usually can tell me a good story, and talk to me about why the movie is the movie they want to make. I just go with my gut.

Neal H. Moritz

#25. When you tell a story you automatically talk about traditions, but they're never separate from the people, the human implications. You're talking about your connections as a human being.

Gayl Jones

#26. I always write three or four projects at the same time. They're stories that I want to tell, and usually I dump them unfinished for the next one in order not to get too cornered and depressed about it.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#27. Everybody goes through a lot of the same things, and I talk about those, and that's the key. You have to connect with your audience, and I might take them on a trip with me, tell them I went here and I went there and they'll go with me, you know, to hear the stories.

Chris Tucker

#28. It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.

Ajay Naidu

#29. The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.

Kurt Busiek

#30. When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

Romola Garai

#31. 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

#32. Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

Philip Pullman

#33. David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

John Connolly

#34. I marvel at these young people: drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall all over myself.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#35. You can't tell such stories about romantic infatuation from the point of view of the object of the infatuation without losing the flavor of the emotion. They would just become 'who is that creep hanging around outside the balcony' stories.

Margaret Atwood

#36. As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house ... Those stories led me to my writing.

Markus Zusak

#37. They all had their own struggles and stories to tell and they al made it to this point, happy and in love.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#38. I've learned there is a void in adult stories across the land. Hollywood, whatever that is anymore, is losing their ability to tell those stories because they're not even thinking of that audience.

Peter Riegert

#39. I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.

Isabel Allende

#40. Our memories are what make us who we are. Some are real. Some are made up. But they are the stories that tell us who we are. Without them we are nobody.

Clare Furniss

#41. People that I'm most attracted to, they're not living by any sort of rules. They're the kind of people with stories to tell.

Carolyn Murphy

#42. There are so many different stories. You can choose to tell them, or not, but they certainly have the right to exist

Jenny Slate

#43. I constantly think as an artist, as a rapper of what are the stories you want to tell? They can't all be, "I'm ill, I'm fresh, look at me, I have money." At some point, when you have an audience for it, there are stories that need to be told.

Himanshu Suri

#44. My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are happening to them that they wish had never happened.

David Morrell

#45. Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

Ray Bradbury

#46. You throw the kitchen sink at your early books. You put everything in there. It's like when you meet a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you tell them all your best stories. By the time you have been married for 10 years, they are crying, 'Shut up!'

Mark Billingham

#47. Where did you get Ultima's name?" many ask me. "That was her name when she came to me," I answer. From that first fortuitous meeting I have trained myself to act as a dream catcher. I don't seek characters, they seem to come to me asking me to tell their stories.

Rudolfo Anaya

#48. It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell.

Howard E. Gardner

#49. We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we are just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don't mean anything

Nicola Yoon

#50. An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#51. History belongs to she who holds the pen ... If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told.

Julianne Malveaux

#52. When women get together, they tell stories. This is how it has always been. Telling stories is our way of saying who we are, where we have come from, what we know, and where we might be headed.

Jalaja Bonheim

#53. A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#54. I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.

Andrew Clements

#55. Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

Mark Twain

#56. In families there is always the mythology. My father died when my kids were quite young still, and yet they still tell his stories. That is how a person lives on.

Jessica Lange

#57. Tattoos tell stories of crime and passion, punishment and regret. They express an outlaw, antiauthoritarian point of view and communicate a romantic solidarity among society's outcasts.

Douglas Kent Hall

#58. Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing,

Mark Leibovich

#59. Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.

Adam Savage

#60. In Kelanna, when they mourn, they tell stories - as if the stories will keep you close to them. Believing that if they tell them often enough, for long enough, you won't be forgotten. Hoping that the stories will keep you alive - if only in memory. But

Traci Chee

#61. When you tell a story and connect with somebody through an emotion that's why they like songs.

Rapsody

#62. I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

Charlie Kaufman

#63. People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.

Phil Klay

#64. Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don't even realize that they're just theories.

Byron Katie

#65. The preacher laughed softly. "You know," he said, "it's a nice thing not bein' a preacher no more. Nobody use' ta tell stories when I was there, or if they did I couldn' laugh. An' I couldn' cuss. Now I cuss all I want, any time I want, an' it does a fella good to cuss if he wants to.

John Steinbeck

#66. Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

David Antin

#67. When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way they actually happened.

Danielle Evans

#68. It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at their peak. And yet you could see some of the shadows of Detroit's demise coming.

David Maraniss

#69. If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.

Sherman Alexie

#70. Listen carefully, be transparent, be responsive, be authentic, tell great stories-the qualities that would make you the hotshot at a party-and they'll make your organization a likeable one on social networks.

Dave Kerpen

#71. Apparently, I am a bit of an exaggerator when I tell stories. But I don't call them lies; I say they are better, funnier truths.

Henry Zebrowski

#72. Some stories feel like they need more time or less time to tell. To not obsessively have to trim or add that final two or three minutes is very helpful, because you can just organically follow how the story feels.

Judd Apatow

#73. Don't be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

Ashly Lorenzana

#74. When I had dyslexia, they didn't diagnose it as that. It was frustrating and embarrassing. I could tell you a lot of horror stories about what you feel like on the inside.

Nolan Ryan

#75. They are not my stories ... they are merely mine to tell

Jeremy Aldana

#76. The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Yahoo Serious

#77. To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

Lee Gutkind

#78. I think about how we can't always live in the moment because moments pass, and when we're lucky, we have the kind of moments that we can't help wanting to go back to. We think about them, remember how they felt, and when more time passes we tell stories of these moments that are worth reliving.

Dana Reinhardt

#79. I tell stories so only the independents do that and they don't pay you that much. I'd rather do TV or an HBO movie.

Penny Marshall

#80. I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.

Yo-Yo Ma

#81. I never liked telling war stories. Some men love to tell them. Hell, some men need to. They need to convince themselves that the war is over. But I'm not one of them.

Paul Allor

#82. Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.

Tanith Lee

#83. So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

Eduardo Galeano

#84. I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.

Scott Bakula

#85. Many organizations don't realize that they have a much better option-they can tell their story directly to an interested market.

David Meerman Scott

#86. Anyone who has been in business can tell war stories about the bumps in the road. But if they've outlasted the competition, ask for their stories about survival. They've figured out how to turn disappointments into opportunities.

Harvey MacKay

#87. Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning. And they're not just about redistributing the goods. They're about figuring out what is good.

Marshall Ganz

#88. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

Chris Abani

#89. Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

Ellen Gilchrist

#90. It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

Edwidge Danticat

#91. The earliest stories in Genesis were not written to tell primeval history. They were written to tell readers about themselves and about God.

Adam Hamilton

#92. I can't protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

Karen Hines

#93. A brand is a story. And you have to tell it well. The good news in this connected world great stories travel fast. And, these days, they travel for free. So there has never been a better time or a cheaper time to start something.

David Hieatt

#94. That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

Eugene H. Peterson

#95. Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

Jo Deurbrouck

#96. Join with those who sing songs, tell stories, enjoy life ... because happiness is contagious. Join those who walk with their heads high even when they have tears in their eyes. Avoid those who ... have never shed a tear

Paulo Coelho

#97. There are so many female directors coming into the industry and a lot of them have important stories they want to tell that seem to fall a little bit more on the indie level.

Anne Fletcher

#98. M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories

Anne Carson

#99. People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell me their stories, and that keeps me going.

Valerie Bertinelli

#100. Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.

Jose Andres