Stories We Tell Quotes

#1. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.

Katherine Center

#2. The things of Catholic life are never boring because we have such a rich tradition and so many stories to tell.

Donald Wuerl

#3. We are gathered here at the end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there's mist in the crisp night air and it's time to tell ghost stories.

Neil Gaiman

#4. 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

#5. Only the victors have stories to tell. We, the vanquished, were all cowards and weaklings by then, whose memories, fears, and enthusiasms should not be remembered.

Guy Sajer

#6. The problem is, we're all using social networks as distribution instead of native platforms to actually tell stories.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#7. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#8. Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.

Jack Dangermond

#9. Why we started the agency to begin with is to tell stories, and the tools that we're using are constantly changing. Every tool will be right for a different sort of situation, but in the end, it's going to be about your view, your voice, and how you put that all together.

Ron Haviv

#10. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#11. 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

#12. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

Kristin Hannah

#13. Everything runs its course. We had told a lot of stories that happened in our life. My kid was getting older, and we were running out of stories to tell.

Howie Mandel

#14. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

Robert Redford

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. In telling our stories, we have to give up part of our imagination, because if I ever told my daughter about this night, I would have to choose the details to tell it, limit the possibilities.

Daniel Chacon

#18. Whenever I work on a film, I have three rules. Only three and I tell them to every screenwriter. I say let's retain the spirit and the intent of the overall story. Let's make it the best film that we possibly can.

Nicholas Sparks

#19. 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

#20. There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Richard Linklater

#21. We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

Alan Rickman

#22. Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#23. The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

Orson Scott Card

#24. We're sending you best wishes
And hope your day goes well
And that you'll find some memories
With stories you can tell
Of how you had a marvelous time
And those around you too
With fun and lots of laughter
And all this just for you..
Have a Very Happy Birthday

Janet Horne

#25. But I could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like "love" or "devotion" or "infatuation" we're exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, but the layers imposed on them through the uses of others.

Alain De Botton

#26. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

Mohsin Hamid

#27. My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

James Patterson

#28. Are you going to tell me what that was about?" Adam asked as we went back upstairs.
"Sometime," I told him. "When we're telling ghost stories around a campfire, and I want to scare you.

Patricia Briggs

#29. Real life is never so neat as the stories we choose to tell about it

Ken Dornstein

#30. 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

#31. What are the lessons intended in the stories we tell to our children today?

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#32. 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

#33. You're trying to bring a character to an audience, and tell stories. That's what we're all trying do.

Jonny Lee Miller

#34. The whole kiss-and-tell thing is a negative approach that often happens in a World Cup. We will see negative stories about the players and it can affect their confidence and the overall performance of the national team on the pitch, let alone the bid to actually stage the competition.

Gary Lineker

#35. If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.

Laura Mullen

#36. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different

Rohinton Mistry

#37. Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.

Matthew D. Lieberman

#38. I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

Andy Serkis

#39. 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

#40. Life is about Jesus. We are not here to tell our story, but His.

Francis Chan

#41. Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.

Sharon Salzberg

#42. We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves.

Tony Robbins

#43. Theologian Stephen Crites says sacred stories are like dwelling places - like booths or tabernacles. We don't tell these stories as much as we inhabit them.

Sarah Arthur

#44. As long as we can tell stories about our ability to survive, the more we will hope, not self-destruct.

Christina Ricci

#45. 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

#46. All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

Brandon Sanderson

#47. No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Joyce Carol Oates

#48. If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#49. When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us.

Marshall Ganz

#50. Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

Randy Alcorn

#51. I'm going to tell stories to the world. I think there's time for me to grow. We'll see.

Sasha Alexander

#52. We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

Steve McCurry

#53. You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

Ben Okri

#54. Words are such powerful things. We can rip somebody apart with them, we can write words down that can forever hurt another person. We can use them to tell stories and lies. We can misquote them and change what other people said to make ourselves look good ...

Joan Bauer

#55. We'll never make Firefly again, because that was a thing that existed and is now gone. And Serenity isn't Firefly, and whatever comes next won't be, either. But I would love to tell more stories of this universe and to hang out with these people on and off for the rest of my career.

Joss Whedon

#56. I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.

Jill Kargman

#57. Well, well, perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am
my friends get round me
we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories
and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I've been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.

Kenneth Grahame

#58. We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Niall Williams

#59. I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

Anne Enright

#60. We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.

Jack Dangermond

#61. Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.

Laurie Anderson

#62. The stories we can tell are those that happen to us; we meet, work, live, laugh, love, demonstrate, strive in community.

Mimi Kennedy

#63. We've got so many stories to tell, you know, we could take on the world.

Yahoo Serious

#64. We are the only ones who can tell our stories because we are the only ones who have lived them.

Susan Wittig Albert

#65. Lydia shrugged. "At least we'll have some stories to tell after graduation."
"These aren't the kind of stories I want to tell.

C.K. Walker

#66. 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

#67. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.

Madeleine L'Engle

#68. 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

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

Julianne Malveaux

#70. Telling stories to make himself into something that he isn't. We all do it. We all tell stories to make ourselves look better.

Richard House

#71. 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

#72. You should do what you enjoy doing, what brings you passion. As kids, we spontaneously sing and dance and tell stories, and along the way, someone comes and says, 'No. You shouldn't be doing that.' And we slowly begin to unlearn our passions. I think you have to hold on to those things.

J. Michael Straczynski

#73. A lot of why we become actors is to fill a void that we have and a part of that void is to live out and tell stories that we've lived or that we hope would have been different in our own lives.

Eric Balfour

#74. We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

Jerome Bruner

#75. We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.

Mark Doty

#76. We tell stories. We talk about statistics. And in 1978, we added an element of the show that gave it its heartbeat: the long distance dedication.

Casey Kasem

#77. We must risk the journey to a higher ground where there
is freedom from the gravitational pull of our stories,
the pull that comes from years of trying to prove that
the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we've made up,
are the truth.

Debbie Ford

#78. We write to share the deepest heart-talk of our souls.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#79. When we approached the Man of Action guys, we said, "We're not really interested in what's come before, except in the way that we want to make sure that it feels like it's Marvel's Avengers Assemble. From that point on, this is your cast. Go to it and tell great stories."

Jeph Loeb

#80. I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.

Justin Theroux

#81. 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

#82. I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

Neil Gaiman

#83. We can't tell particularly smart stories if we want to keep our audience big enough to pay for these big spectacle films that we want to do.

Duncan Jones

#84. We need to take time to connect with the poor, resist our unceasing cravings, and pray. But we also need to gather with friends and family, share in God's good provision, eat delicious food, tell stories that encourage us all, and celebrate the risen Lord.

Chris Seay

#85. I'm a slave to the beats of the story, not to the words we use to tell the story.

Steve Dildarian

#86. I like storytelling. We all have an active thing that we do that gives us self-esteem, that makes us proud; it's necessary. I have to tell stories because that's the way the wiring went in.

Paul Zindel

#87. In the South, we tell stories. We tell stories if you're in a sales position, if you're in a retail position, you lure your customer by telling a story. You just do.

Tate Taylor

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell.

Maya Lang

#91. 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

#92. I think we all have a responsibility to tell good stories.

John Krasinski

#93. But I know we need to keep warm here on earth
And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.

Naomi Shihab Nye

#94. Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us.

Patti Callahan Henry

#95. Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

Gina Greenlee

#96. To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

Rumer Godden

#97. We each have a story to tell, I know; so let each one take his turn.

Maud Lindsay

#98. New technology is changing the way we can film. It's enabling us to get fresh new images and tell brand new stories.

Karen Bass

#99. Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man.

George Leigh Mallory

#100. Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.

Byron Katie