Top 68 Why We Tell Stories Quotes
#1. Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.
Rabih Alameddine
#2. I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
Anne Enright
#3. 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
#4. I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.
Steven Johnson
#5. 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
#6. TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.
Vince Gilligan
#7. As I continue to write as M. O'Keefe, I find myself following darker story lines. Plots I might have flinched away from I now rush toward. Using sex as a tool to tell women's stories is endlessly fascinating.
Molly O'Keefe
#8. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Alan Bradley
#9. In my films quite often, paranoia usually leads to the truth so it is kind of a psychological state of mind to think that what you fear may come true, and those are the types of stories that I like to tell.
Larry Fessenden
#10. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.
Robert Redford
#12. 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
#13. Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
Allan Gurganus
#14. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#15. 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
#16. Strange that I should choose you for the confidante of all this, young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera - mistress to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you!
Charlotte Bronte
#17. The word 'confession,' to me, means needing to be absolved. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm not asking people to understand. I'd like to think that I tell stories and sometimes my life weaves through it.
Tori Amos
#18. 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
#19. When I write a story, I just wanna tell you what's in my head. It can come from real life and then turn into fantasy, stuff just rhyming. And write about what you know. I just like to tell stories that have not been told or told from my perspective.
Nas
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.
Umberto Eco
#26. So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.
Clive Barker
#27. It's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.
Alan Rickman
#28. We tell each other stories to help each other live. That's why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That's why I went to poetry in the first place, that's why I stay with it, that's why I'll never leave it.
Marie Howe
#29. Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.
John Slattery
#30. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?
Alan Rickman
#31. What spares us is memory," he said. "It's what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That's why you're so important, Charlie. You're a guardian of our national memory.
Frederick Weisel
#32. Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.
Roman Payne
#33. When I was in Boy Scouts, back in the day, we'd tell stories around the campfire. That's why I love movies. It's literally you and your friends, telling stories around a campfire, whatever they may be.
Jon M. Chu
#34. That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.
John Green
#35. I can tell you many reasons why environmental stories don't get adequate attention in conventional media. Basically, environmental risks don't fit the norms of journalism. They're incremental. We hate incremental.
Andrew Revkin
#36. And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.
And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
Helene Cixous
#37. 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
#38. The things of Catholic life are never boring because we have such a rich tradition and so many stories to tell.
Donald Wuerl
#39. You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?
Melina Marchetta
#40. I just want to tell stories that have an impact on people. Somebody needs to have an impact because people are lost. People are really lost.
Rebecca De Mornay
#41. These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
Clifford D. Simak
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.
T.C. Boyle
#45. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#46. There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.
Susan Fletcher
#47. I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.
Hedy Lamarr
#48. When you want to say something very important, tell it with a short sentence! There is no time for long stories!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#49. The marvelous thing about 'Doctor Who' is that it tells stories that no one else can tell.
Russell T. Davies
#50. I always wanted to tell stories and act.
Eli Wallach
#51. You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
Donald Miller
#52. In general, I feel so much of pop culture is set in the generic big city, particularly comics. I feel like there are so many other stories to tell.
Jeff Lemire
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.
Todd Solondz
#56. 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
#57. Stories happen to those who tell them.
Thucydides
#58. 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
#59. I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifting stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.
Wes Craven
#60. The problem is, we're all using social networks as distribution instead of native platforms to actually tell stories.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#61. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.
Kelseyleigh Reber
#66. 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
#67. Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It's a way to find healing, and to healing others.
M. Kirin
#68. 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
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