Top 100 The 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. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
Orson Scott Card
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Real life is never so neat as the stories we choose to tell about it
Ken Dornstein
#22. 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
#23. What are the lessons intended in the stories we tell to our children today?
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different
Rohinton Mistry
#28. Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.
Matthew D. Lieberman
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
Sharon Salzberg
#32. We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves.
Tony Robbins
#33. As long as we can tell stories about our ability to survive, the more we will hope, not self-destruct.
Christina Ricci
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
Joyce Carol Oates
#37. If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#38. 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
#39. I'm going to tell stories to the world. I think there's time for me to grow. We'll see.
Sasha Alexander
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
Anne Enright
#45. 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
#46. Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
Laurie Anderson
#47. The stories we can tell are those that happen to us; we meet, work, live, laugh, love, demonstrate, strive in community.
Mimi Kennedy
#48. We've got so many stories to tell, you know, we could take on the world.
Yahoo Serious
#49. We are the only ones who can tell our stories because we are the only ones who have lived them.
Susan Wittig Albert
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. History belongs to she who holds the pen ... If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told.
Julianne Malveaux
#54. 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
#55. We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.
Mark Doty
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I'm a slave to the beats of the story, not to the words we use to tell the story.
Steve Dildarian
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.
Gina Greenlee
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.
Patricia Hampl
#74. Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.
Sarah Moss
#75. Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.
Robert T. Bakker
#76. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
Alan Kay
#78. 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
#79. The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#80. We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.
Adam Ross
#81. I think history has less of an impact on current times than the stories that we tell ourselves about that history [do].
Annie Leonard
#82. 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
#83. Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.
Colum McCann
#84. 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
#85. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.
Martha C. Nussbaum
#86. We all tell our own stories the way we live our lives. My story is: Life is too short to not believe in fresh voices. I don't have Hollywood stars. I have great American artists.
Kevin McCollum
#87. Look," said Lamia, "what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?
Dan Simmons
#88. Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.
Serge Schmemann
#89. 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
#90. How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should super-cede them.
Stephanie Danler
#91. 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
#92. The time is just right to take risks and tell stories the way we want to tell them.
Afia Nathaniel
#93. Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project.
Roy Osherove
#95. Of course, that's one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We're still waiting for the results.
Charles Finch
#96. I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#97. The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.
David Remnick
#98. Only victors have stories to tell,
we the vanquished were then thought of
as cowards and weaklings whose memories
and fears should not be remembered.
Guy Sajer
#99. We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
#100. A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.
Ken Liu
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