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• Story: An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. Oxford Dictionary
• Story: A description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Story: A narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed tointerest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale.  Dictionary.com
• Story: An account of incidents or events.  Merriam Webster
• Story: An account or recital of an event or a series of events, either true or fictitious.  American Heritage Dictionary
• Letting go of the story of self,  Writing,  Books,  Fantasy,  Zen stories

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Humans are story-telling animals …    

• Stories–individual stories, family stories, national stories–are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. Yann Martel 
• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion, The White Album 
• Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not. Michael Shermer 
• God made man because he loves stories. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlev
• The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pannarrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. Terry Pratchett 

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… with an innate need for stories    

• After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. Philip Pullman
• All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by … religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need. Harvey Cox 
• Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. Richard Kearney   
• Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. Eric Hoffer 
• There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. Ursula K. Le Guin
• 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 
• If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. Barry Lopez, in Crow and Weasel
• 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
• Human needs

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Stories have been around as long as people have    

• Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
• People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. Studs Terkel
• People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs. Albert Bates Lord

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Stories are the real atoms of the universe    

• The universe is made up of stories, not atoms. Muriel Rukeyser 
• “What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?” “Stories. And they give me hope.”  Neil Gaiman 
• 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 
• Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word…. Paul Murray 
• As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever- smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.  Carlos Ruiz Zafón 

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Stories can be a kind of magic    

• Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all. Erin Morgenstern 
• There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Erin Morgenstern 
• Magic

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Stories can speak directly to the heart and soul    

• When Stories nestle in the body, soul comes forth. Deena Metzger
• I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle in a new pattern, a new way of being. It is a tradition that believes that the story speaks to the soul, not the ego… to the heart, not the head. In today’s world, we yearn so to ’understand’, to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells. Donna Jacobs Sife
• Live your life fom your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and heal people’s souls. Melody Beatti
• Maybe stories are just data with a soul. Brené Brown
• A fine work of art – music, dance, painting, story – has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place. Robert McKee 
• A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story- tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. Ursula K. Le Guin 
• I think it’s a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers. Piers Anthony 
• When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller. Robert McKee 
• The heart,  The soul

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Stories can make us laugh and cry    

• A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart. Chuck Palahniuk 
• Laughter,  Tears

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Stories can make us more loving and courageous     

• Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
• But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears? Wally Lamb
• Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. Ben Okri
• Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Madeleine L’Engle 
• Love,  Courage

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Stories can give us food for thought    

• The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Brandon Sanderson 
• Reflection,  Contemplation

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Stories can increase our understanding of life …    

• Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life’s kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people’s stories.  To remember that the real world is made up of just such stories.  Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life’s events “behind us” and get on with our living.  After we stop we see that certain of life’s issues will be with us for as long as we live.  We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It’s the way life teaches us how to live. Rachel Naomi Remen 
• The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?  Yann Martel, Life of Pi 
• People who understand everything get no stories. Bertolt Brecht 
• Understanding

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…  providing a universal way to create meaning …    

• Storytellers, by the very act of telling, communicate a radical learning that changes lives and the world: telling stories is a universally accessible means through which people make meaning. Chris Cavanaugh 
• Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. Hannah Arendt
• Thinking can often be unstructured, disorganized and even chaotic. Writing encourages the creation of a storyline and structure that helps people make sense of what has happened and work toward a solution. Writing is a systematic solution based approach. Richard Wiseman 
• 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
• 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
• Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. Robert McKee 
• Meaning

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… helping us to make sense of things    

• History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot. Paul Murray 
• If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. John Berger 
• Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life. Eudora Welty
• If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. Siberian Elder
• Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby 
• We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for. Malcolm Gladwell 

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Stories reveal secrets and truths about ourselves    

• Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life. Milan Kundera
• Truth

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Stories provide a powerful way to pass on experiences, wisdom and ideas …    

• When we haven’t the time to listen to each other’s stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves.  But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone’ s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants. Rachel Naomi Remen 
• We have stories to tell, stories that provide wisdom about the journey of life. What more have we to give one another than our ‘truth’ about our human adventure as honestly and as openly as we know how? Rabbi Saul Rubin 
• Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Rachel Naomi Remen
• Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher… Patti Davis
• Stories are how we learn. The progenitors of the world’s religions understood this, handing down our great myths and legends from generation to generation. Bill Mooney and David Holt, The Storyteller’s Guide
• Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. Robert McKee
• One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow? Mathew Fox
• We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories. Roger C. Shank, from Tell Me A Story
• Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. 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, vice president at Walt Disney
• Experience,   Wisdom,  Ideas

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… for people often learn best by stories    

• Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Consequently, stories often pack more punch than sermons. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story. Jesus did it. He called his stories ‘parables’. Janet Litherland 
• Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. Mary Catherine Bateson

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Stories can affirm what is good about life    

• By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing. Ira Glass 
• Life will go on as long as there is someone to sing, to dance, to tell stories and to listen Oren Lyons
• Affirmation

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Stories connect us to each other …    

• A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land? Alexander McCall Smith 
• Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. Barry Lopez
• Stories are the glue that holds people together in families, communities, nations. Jerry Large 
• Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another. Terry Tempest Williams
• Enemies are people who’s story you haven’t heard, or who’s face you haven’t seen. Irene Butter 
• Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story. Neil Gaiman
• We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel- ‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.’ You’re not as alone as you thought. John Steinbeck
• Connection

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… building empathy    

• 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
• Empathy

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Stories connect God and man    

• Sacred stories are those of transformation, they are stories that draw us closer to what I call the Lord Within The Heart, and they help us to see our connection to all things. There’s a saying in the Jewish tradition that the shortest distance between a human and God is through a story. So if storytelling is a journey, sacred storytelling is a pilgrimage to a place called Hope. Andy Fraenkel
• Connection,  Connectedness

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Stories connect to other stories    

• Stories are like spiders, with all their long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each. Neil Gaiman 
• Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story. Neil Gaiman 
• Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word…. Paul Murray 

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Stories are an ingrained part of our culture and civilisation …    

• The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own. Laurens Van der Post
• Many people don’t realize the extent to which stories influence our behavior and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that molded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others. Lawrence Shapiro

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… shaping our values …    

• Many people don’t realize the extent to which stories influence our behavior and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that molded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others. Lawrence Shapiro
• Values

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… shaping the reader and the world    

• There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies. Alan Moore 
• People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Terry Pratchett 
• People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. Neil Gaiman
• The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. Harold Goddard

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Good stories outlast the people who tell them    

• Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. Neil Gaiman

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Good stories transport us to another place    

• There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place. K. Rowling 

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Good stories allow us to inhabit them  

• When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own. John Berger
• A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Alice Munro 

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Good stories stay with us forever    

• Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. Neil Gaiman 

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Good stories never grow tired    

• …the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.  Arundhati Roy 

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Good stories have a beginning, middle and end    

• A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end… but not necessarily in that order. Jean-Luc Godard

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There are only a few human stories …    

• Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum. Paulo Coelho 
• Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it. Kurt Vonnegut 
• There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. Willa Cather
• I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves. Patrick Rothfuss 

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There are stories about “good” verse “bad” and “good” verse “good”    

• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill? John Steinbeck 
• The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.” Leo Tolstoy 
• Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey. Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus 

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There are love stories    

• Real love stories never have endings. Richard Bach     
• The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender. Emil Ludwig 
• Some of the greatest love stories ever told are the ones we make up in our own mind. Shannon L. Alder
• The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye until we meet again. Jimi Hendrix
• How stupid lovers can be! But if they were not, there would be no story. Jean Plaidy
• When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead. Susan Elizabeth Phillips 
• Every great love starts with a great story. Nicholas Sparks. The Notebook 
• The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity – love. And the story of a love is not important – what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity. Helen Hayes
• Love

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There are stories about a voyage or journey    

• All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Leo Tolstoy 
• Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum. Paulo Coelho 
• Life is a journey,  Discovery

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There are stories about wolves    

• “All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.” “All of them?” “Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”  Margaret Atwood 

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Listen to the stories of others    

• Helping others, that’s the main thing. The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other’s stories.  Eli Wiesel 
• Listen to other people tell their story, but don’t believe them. You know that it’s just a story that is only true for them, but listen because the communication can be wonderful. Don Miguel Ruiz
• Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. Lord Chesterfield
• The next time someone tells you a story or shares an accomplishment with you, notice your tendency to say something about yourself in response. Richard Carlson 
• They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another. Pandora Poikilos
• Listening

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… and allow their stories to inspire you    

• Another great way to find inspiration and motivation is to read the stories of other people who have overcome obstacles and made their dreams come true. These motivational stories remind us that there is always a way to create what we want in our lives- we just need to believe it! Amanda Harvey 
• Do a little research online to find famous people who have overcome depression. Read about the many celebrities who are revealing their battles with depression. Read their stories. Take heart in the fact that there are others who have overcome depression. Jack Herrick 
• If we read the stories of the great spiritual teachers of the past, we find that they have attained spiritual realization through a great deal of meditation, solitude and practice. They did not take any shortcuts. Rajiv Mehrotra 
• Inspiration

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Every story is important    

• Everybody’s story is important in this huge tapestry we are weaving. Sarah VanLanduyt 

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Read stories in books …    

• Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you’re working. Tell them it’s research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone. Jennifer Weiner 

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… for books contain a boundless universe of stories    

• A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief. George Saunders 
• Sometimes a book isn’t a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sometimes it’s the only story you knew how to tell.  Tahereh Mafi 
• Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. Anne Fadiman 
• After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels. Carlos Ruiz Zafón 
• Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Umberto Eco 

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Tell your stories to others …    

• Without a best friend to tell stories to, it almost didn’t matter if they even happened. Leila Howland 
• Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones. Benjamin Disraeli
• Stop being so impressed with what other people are doing and get impressed about yourself. You have a story that the world wants to hear. Go tell it! Stone Evans 
• But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you. Diane Setterfield 
• We owe it to each other to tell stories. Neil Gaiman
• If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. Brené Brown 
• Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here. Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees 

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… but choose carefully who you share your stories with    

• Share with people who have earned the right to hear your story. Brene Brown 
• If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm. Brené Brown
• Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: “Who has earned the right to hear my story?” If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky. If we have a friend, or small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredibly lucky. Brené Brown 

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Tell your stories of shame and grief …    

• Grief needs to hear your story told. Speak it out to a sacred listener. Be witnessed. And then… tell a new story, one that includes the description of how you healed.  Danielle La Porte 
• The only reason I’ve shared my story is to take that tiny baby step of breaking down the stigma attached to depression. Clara Hughes
• All sorrows can be born if you put them in a story or tell a story about them. Karen Blixen 
• Shame,  Grief

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… for telling an untold story helps to relieve pain and to bear sorrow    

• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Maya Angelou 
• If a story is in you, it has got to come out. William Faulkner 
• The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories. C.Carl Jung
• All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Isak Dinesen 
• Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow. Sylvia Plath 
• Pain,  Sadness,  Grief

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Tell your story and you may find a special someone who appreciates it    

• Sometimes I feel like relationships consist of telling your same life stories to different people until someone finally appreciates them. Kate Rockland 
• I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories. Gabrielle Zevin
• Soulmates

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Nurture your ability to tell stories    

• Because there is a natural storytelling urge and ability in all human beings, even just a little nurturing of this impulse can bring about astonishing and delightful results. Nancy Mellon, The Art of Storytelling

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Tell stories around the fire    

• There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it. Charles Dickens 

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To be a writer is to be a story teller    

• You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. Annie Proulx 
• A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story- tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. Ursula K. Le Guin 
• After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love. Ernest Hemingway 
• Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand–a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods–or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. Willa Cather 
• Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it. John Green 
• I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon. Philip Pullman 
• I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work. Jim Goldberg 
• I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He’s not a great mind, he’s not a great thinker, he’s not a great philosopher, he’s a story- teller. Erskine Caldwell 
• It’s not the college degree that makes a writer. The great thing is to have a story to tell. Polly Adler
• No one will pay you just to write. They’ll pay you to communicate well, synthesize info, tell a good story. Alexis Grant 
• Writing

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Writing a story can be a journey of exploration    

• But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it. C. Boyle
• Exploration

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Writing a story can be a wonderful pleasure    

• There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you. Beatrix Potter 
• Pleasure

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Write the stories you would like to read    

• Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either. Meg Cabot 
• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. Kurt Vonnegut 

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Write the stories that choose you, demanding to be written    

• Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us. Clover Donovan 
• I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. Chris Cleave, Little Bee 

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Write stories that challenge you    

• If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough. John Irving 

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Write stories about characters that interest you to the point of obsession    

• To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you’re completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there’s no point to continue. Jennifer Salaiz
• Tell the story that’s been growing in your heart, the characters you can’t keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning. Jennifer Weiner 
• I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. Stephen King

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Write the story of your life

• I really think that anyone who’s fortunate enough to live to be over fifty years old should take some time, even if it’s just a couple of weekends, to sit down and write the story of your life, even if it’s only twenty pages, and even if it’s only for your children and grandchildren…You’ll be surprised what you find. Bill Clinton

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Write stories honestly and courageously    

• The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. Neil Gaiman 
• Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world. Robert McKee 
• Honesty,  Courage

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Keep your stories moving    

• In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling. Stephen King 

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Realise a great story is always better than your ability to tell it    

• The story is always better than your ability to write it. Robin McKinley
• One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you’re going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you’ve turned into an arrogant self- satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you’re never going to write well enough. Of course that’s what keeps you trying — trying as hard as you can — which is a good thing.  Robin McKinley 

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It is the reader and listener who gives life to a story    

• The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. Ursula K. Le Guin 
• Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life. John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things 
• It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. Italo Calvino
• Storytelling is relating a tale to one or more listeners through voice and gesture. It is not the same as reading a story aloud or reciting a piece from memory or acting out a drama-though it shares common characteristics with these arts. The storyteller looks into the eyes of the audience and together they compose the tale. The storyteller begins to see and re- create, through voice and gesture, a series of mental images; the audience, from the first moment of listening, squints, stares, smiles, leans forward or falls asleep, letting the teller know whether to slow down, speed up, elaborate, or just finish. Each listener, as well as each teller, actually composes a unique set of story images derived from meanings associated with words, gestures, and sounds. The experience can be profound, exercising the thinking and touching emotions of both teller and listener. The National Council of Teachers of English in support of storytelling in the academic classroom

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The shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story    

• A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. Diane Setterfield 
• Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. North American Indian 
• Tell the truth. That way you don’t have to remember a story. John Wooden 
• The master gave his teaching in parables and stories, which his disciples listened to with pleasure-and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper. The master was unmoved. To all their objections he would say, ‘You have yet to understand that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story’. Anthony de Mello
• When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it’s no longer truth–it’s our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s true for anyone else. Don Miguel Ruiz 
• To my way of thinking, all stories that are told from the heart, that arise from one person’s experience or an entire people’s experience, are indeed true. Truth is experienced and related in many different forms, from many different perspectives. There is conventional seeing and then the seeing that arises from the hidden depths of our being. Mobi Ho 
• Stories are important…They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth. Patrick Ness 
• Stories are a different kind of true. Emma Donoghue, Room 
• My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. Diane Setterfield 
• By Aladdin’s lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth. Christopher Moore 
• Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths… The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he’s been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that… But the second kind, they show you life more like it is… The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up. Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light 
• Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart. Stephen R. Lawhead 
• It is your obligation to speak things that have truth, because this is your life’s work. Judith Black
• Truth

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Stories are lies that reveal truths    

• Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. Hilary Mantel 
• A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself. Daniel Wallace 
• Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself. Alan Moore, V for Vendetta 
• Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. Albert Camus
• We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write. Neil Gaiman 
• All stories are lies. But good stories are lies made from light and fire. And they lift our hearts out of the dust, and out of the grave. Mike Carey 
• Truth

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The job of fiction is to tell the truth    

• Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It’s a paradox that’s at the heart of any kind of storytelling. Jeremy Northam
• There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. Doris Lessing
• Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being “false,” “untrue,” yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction. Clark Zlotchew 

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Never let facts get in the way of a good story    

• Many stories magnify a fact. Toba Beta
• Storytellers seldom let facts get in the way of perpetuating a legend, although a few facts add seasoning and make the legend more believable. John H. Alexander
• Maybe stories are just data with a soul. Brené Brown
• Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. Norman Mailer
• In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of a story. Walter Cronkite
• Remember son, many a good story has been ruined by over verification. James Gordon Bennett
• 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
• To hell with facts! We need stories! Ken Kesey 
• Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing. Neil Gaiman

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Photography is a form of story telling    

• If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera. Lewis Hine 
• Photography must be integrated with the story. James Wong Howe 
• Pictures could not be accessories to the story — evidence — they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame. Tatjana Soli 
• A person is neither whole nor healthy without the memories of photo albums. They are the storybook of our lives.  They provide a nostalgic escape from the tormented days of the present. Patrick Garry 
• Photography

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Cinema is a form of story telling    

• I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema. Quentin Tarantino
• Movies

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Journalism is a form of story telling    

• It’s all storytelling, you know. That’s what journalism is all about. Tom Brokaw 

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Song writing is a form of story telling    

• A song ain’t nothin’ in the world but a story just wrote with music to it. Hank Williams, Sr.
• People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. Neil Gaiman
• A book is a story for the mind. A song is a story for the soul. Eric Pio 
• Funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story. Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key 

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History is a form of story telling    

• Many people don’t realize the extent to which stories influence our behavior and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that molded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others. Lawrence Shapiro
• All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story! Jess Walter 
• People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. Studs Terkel
• History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot. Paul Murray 
• History is nothing but a series of stories, whether it be world history or family history. Bill Mooney and David Holt, The Storyteller’s Guide
• If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. Rudyard Kipling 
• The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stephen King 
• The Storyteller’s Creed: I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge, That myth is more potent than history, That dreams are more powerful than facts, That hope always triumphs over experience, That laughter is the only cure for grief, And I believe that love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum
• History

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Gardening is a form of story telling    

• Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. Eudora Welty 
• Gardening

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Nature tells a story    

• A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and an end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water- carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder. Andy Russell 
• If an apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would be, still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed. Lucy Larcom 
• In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth. Rachel Carson 
• The oaks and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what “the story of the trees” would be to us if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand.
• We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. Carl Sagan 
• There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story.  Linda Hogan 
• Nature

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Your body tells a story …    

• Your body is the ground and metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopedia, your life story. Everything that happens to you is stored and reflected in your body. In the marriage of flesh and spirit, divorce is impossible. Gabrielle Roth 
• Bodies don’t think, care, or have any problem with themselves. They never beat themselves up or shame themselves. They simply try to keep themselves balanced and healthy. They’re entirely efficient, intelligent, kind, and resourceful. Where there’s no thought, there’s no problem. It’s the story we believe-prior to doing inquiry-that leaves us confused. I tell the story of my body, and because I haven’t inquired, I believe that my body is the problem and that if only this or that changed, I’d be happy. But my suffering can’t be my body’s fault. Byron Katie
• The body

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… especially its scars    

• From every wound there is a scar, and every scar tells a story. A story that says, I survived. Fr Craig Scott 
• Scars are tattoos with better stories. Toyota advertisement 

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Every face tells a story    

• Behind every mask there is a face, and behind that a story. Marty Rubin
• For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him. Emma Donoghue 
• Look at the faces of people who you meet. Each one has an incredible story behind their face. A story that you could never fully fathom. Not only their own story but the story of their ancestors. They all go back so far.

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To be a person is to have a story to tell …    

• Remember that every person you meet has a story to tell, a lesson to teach and a dream to do. Robin Sharma 
• Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Max Ehrman
• Every one of us is a wonder. Every one of us has a story. Kristin Hunter
• A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it. Fred Allen
• To be a person is to have a story to tell. Isak Dinesen    
• The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. James Matthew Barrie 
• We’re all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It’s a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it’s true, but then so’s everything. Charles de Lint 
• There’s a story behind every person. There’s a reason why they are the way they are. Think about that before you judge somebody.
• We’re all stories, in the end. Steven Moffat 

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… for every life comes with a story …    

• Every life comes with a story … and a possibility for a great adventure. Kobi Yamada 
• Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time. Leo Buscaglia 
• My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident. Hans Christian Andersen
• Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story. Ashleigh Brilliant
• What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. Pedro Calderon de la Barca
• The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye until we meet again. Jimi Hendrix
• Life itself is the most wonderful fairytale of all. Hans Christian Andersen
• Their story, yours and mine — it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them. William Carlos Williams

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… that may or may not end at death    

• Death is not a period, but a comma in the story of life. Amos Traver 
• The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it. Mary Catherine Bateson 
• There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there’s loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another. Charlie Kaufman 
• Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void. Jean Baudrillard
• The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death. Neil Gaiman 
• Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what future time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature. Marcus Aurelius
• Death

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You create the story of your life, moment by moment …    

• You’re writing the story of your life one moment at a time. Doc Childre and Howard Martin
• In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives. Sam Keen

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… by the choices you make    

• You write your life story by the choices you make. Helen Mirren
• Choice

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Take control of your life story and make it happen for you are the author of it    

• You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny. The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand. Irene C. Kassorla 
• As you begin to pay attention to your own stories and what they say about you, you will enter into the exciting process of becoming, as you should be, the author of your own life, the creator of your own possibilities. Mandy Aftel
• Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story. Charlotte Eriksson
• I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter ‘till they bloom, ‘til you yourself burst into bloom. Clarissa Pinkola Estes 
• If you want your life to be a magnificent story, then begin by realizing that you are the author and everyday you have the opportunity to write a new page. Mark Houlahan
• Make your own news. Be your own breaking story. Don’t look to the media to tell you what’s happening in your life. Be what’s happening. Steve Chandler
• This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever. Jandy Nelson, The Sky is Everywhere 
• The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. Neil Gaiman 

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Live so you have a courageous story to tell …    

• A man that holds strong to his hope during the storms of trials and tribulations, surely lives to happily tell his courageous story. Edmond Mbiaka 

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… a story that is worth writing about    

• My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to? Charlotte Eriksson 
• I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem. Watch me burn. Love always, Charlotte.  Charlotte Eriksson 
• I really think that anyone who’s fortunate enough to live to be over fifty years old should take some time, even if it’s just a couple of weekends, to sit down and write the story of your life, even if it’s only twenty pages, and even if it’s only for your children and grandchildren…You’ll be surprised what you find. Bill Clinton
• Don’t die with your music (stories/talents) still inside you. Listen to your intuitive inner voice and find what passion stirs your soul. Wayne Dyer

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Be the hero of your story  

• Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. John Barth
• In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind. The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain. David Richo 
• The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life. Joseph Campbell
• We are the hero of our own story. Mary McCarthy
• The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story. Don Miguel Ruiz

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Live your own story, not someone else’s    

• Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. Rumi
• People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. Neil Gaiman

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Create a life story that will live on after your death    

• Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you. Shannon L. Alder 
• We’re all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It’s a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it’s true, but then so’s everything. Charles de Lint 
• Our story is the greatest legacy that you will leave to your friends. It’s the longest-lasting legacy you will leave to your heirs. Steve Saint 

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Think of yourself as an artist creating the story of your life    

• Every day is an opportunity to be creative – the canvas is your mind, the brushes and colours are your thoughts and feelings, the panorama is your story, the complete picture is a work of art called, ‘my life’. Be careful what you put on the canvas of your mind today – it matters. Innerspace 
• Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story. Don Miguel Ruiz
• If you can see yourself as an artist, and you can see that your life is your own creation, then why not create the most beautiful story for yourself? Don Miguel Ruiz  
• The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well. Criss Jami
• When you remember that you are the author of your own life story, you are free to create a masterpiece.
• Art

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Create a life story that inspires others    

• I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it’s shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it’s a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It’s truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day. Tom Hooper
• Live your life fom your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and heal people’s souls. Melody Beatti
• Inspiration

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Create a life story with love at its heart    

• When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another. Oprah Winfrey     

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Own your story and you get to write the ending    

• Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. BrenéBrown
• You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness. BrenéBrown
• If you own this story you get to write the ending. Brené Brown

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Often, we torture ourselves with the sad stories we tell ourselves    

• All the suffering that goes on inside our minds is not reality. It’s just a story we torture ourselves with. Byron Katie
• It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Haruki Murakami
• The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can’t get away from it. Not ever. Nina LaCour 
• Let go of the story of self

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We terrify ourselves with our stories about the the future    

• Notice how often the anxiety you are feeling is based on a story you are telling yourself of what may happen in the future… and not the reality of what is actually happening in this moment. Brian Piergrossi

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We amplify our pain by creating unhappy stories around it    

• Experiencing pain can often trigger unhelpful and negative thoughts… “This is never going to end,” “This is just going to get worse,” or “I can’t bear this.” In turn, these thoughts lead to anxiety, depression or anger, because we tend to believe the stories we think when we are unmindful, and this further adds to our suffering. The practice of Mindfulness includes becoming aware of our thoughts and seeing that our thoughts are indeed just thoughts and are not facts.  This can be quite a liberating discovery.  Richard Hanson 
• Every story is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t be having this experience. God is unjust. Life isn’t fair. Byron Katie
• Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. Eckhart Tolle
• Pain

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The stories we tell about ourselves are very unreliable …    

• How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. Julian Barnes 
• The left brain weaves its story in order to convince itself and you that it is in full control.… What is so adaptive about having what amounts to a spin doctor in the left brain? The interpreter is really trying to keep our personal story together. To do that, we have to learn to lie to ourselves. Michael Gazzaniga
• When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it’s no longer truth–it’s our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s true for anyone else. Don Miguel Ruiz 
• Oddly enough, we come to rely upon our own stories so much that it seems that all we can tell ourselves are stories as well. Roger C. Shank

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… for they are based on selective memories    

• Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. Alice Munro
• The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life. Rob Sheffield
• The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. Tim O’Brien 
• It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else. Nancy Horan
• Memory

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Also, our stories are often inherited from others; many of them lies     

• So much of the knowledge in our minds is based on lies and superstitions that come from thousands of years ago. Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories. Don Miguel Ruiz
• Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human. Don Miguel Ruiz 

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We get our sense of identity from the stories we tell about ourselves, allowing them to define us    

• Who are you?’ someone asks. ‘I am the story of my self,’ comes the answer. Scott Momaday 
• If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us– through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique. Oliver Sacks
• It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. Patrick Rothfuss 
• Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep telling yourself in your head. “Me and my story.” Eckhart Tolle 
• We live in a world where most people believe they are their story. “I was born in this family, this is where I was raised, these are the things that happened to me, and this is what I did.” Oprah Winfrey 

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Our stories influence greatly what shows up in our life and how we show up    

• The way you talk about yourself and your life—your story—has a great deal to do with what shows up in your day-to- day experience. Your thoughts create filters through which you view your life. If you think of yourself as a Victim, you filter all that happens to you through the lens of DDT, and you find plenty of evidence to support that viewpoint. That’s why the orientation you adopt is so important: it exerts a powerful influence on your life direction. David Emerald 
• All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story! Jess Walter 
• If you say you’re worthy, you are. If you say you’re not worthy, you’re not. Either way, you’ll grow into your story. Harv Eker 
• Life is revealed as a place to contribute and we as contributors. Not because we have done a measurable amount of good, but because that is the story we tell. Benjamin Zander 

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If fact, our whole world is a projection of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world    

• Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is  a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the  projected image of your thoughts.  Byron Katie 
• The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story. Byron Katie 
• The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it. Byron Katie
• It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. Patrick Rothfuss 
• Projection

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Our stories can limit us greatly if we let them    

• Continuing to tell stories of shortage only continues to contradict your desire for abundance, and you cannot have it both ways: You cannot focus upon unwanted and receive wanted. Abraham-Hicks
• The only thing keeping you from what you want is your story about why you can’t have it. Tony Robbins
• The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it. Jordan Belfort 
• We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story. Maxine Kumin
• Limitation

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Our stories can block our direct experience of life    

• The reality is that without a story you’re genderless-not male, not female, not even human. You’re not anything. It is not anything, it’s more than that. It’s all-inclusive; it doesn’t even question. There are no questions in the void; there is only the experience of And not even that.  Byron Katie 
• Watch the mind as it tries, in every moment, to co-opt experience by translating it into a story. It tries to draw you away from experience into a mental world that simulates experience. If it succeeds, that story becomes your experience. Gina Lake

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Become mindfully aware of the stories you spin about yourself    

• Becoming mindfully aware of the stories we spin about our physical discomfort quiets and steadies the mind so that the “mud” settles and we can see the thoughts more clearly. Then we have a choice. We can continue to blindly believe them or we can calmly assess their validity. Toni Bernhard, J.D. 

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If your story is limiting you, question it    

• Question your stories. Question your assumptions. Question your opinions. Question your conclusions. Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness and joy.  The keys to freedom are in your hands.  Use them.  Adyashanti 

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If your story is limiting you, change it    

• There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world. Terry Pratchett 
• Create a new story. Focusing on the old story isn’t serving you. It may in the short term, but telling yourself a new story where you are actively problem solving and taking on more personal responsibility will help you to get past the victim shadow. Emily Roberts 
• Those times of depression tell you that it’s either time to get out of the story you’re in and move into a new story, or that you’re in the right story but there’s some piece of it you are not living out. Carol S. Pearson 
• Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. Salman Rushdie   
• A belief is only a thought you continue to think. A belief is nothing more than a chronic pattern of thought, and you have the ability – if you try even a little bit – to begin a new pattern, to tell a new story, to achieve a different vibration, to change your point of attraction. Abraham-Hicks
• If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life. Jean Houston

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Tell a life story for yourself that is more affirming    

• It’s all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us. Roz & Ben Zander

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Tell a life story for yourself that is more cheerful    

• We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story. Shauna Niequist

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Tell a life story for yourself as you want it to be    

• You have to begin to tell the story of your life as you now want it to be and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is. Esther and Jerry Hicks

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We constantly tell stories about ourselves to help digest the past    

• You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,’ he says, ‘the same way this theater seems to digest people.’ With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs. Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud. But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed. Chuck Palahniuk

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Remember, your past is just a story you tell yourself    

• Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no more power over you. Chuck Palahniuk 
• The past is just a story we tell ourselves. Spike Jonze
• Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it. Marianne Williamson
• People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future. Chuck Palahniuk 
• The stories that you tell about your past shape your future. Eric Ransdell 
• There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future. Eleanor Brown
• The past

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Stop allowing your story of the past to define and limit you    

• I do believe, however, that as adults we must reach a point of reconciliation with our stories. Eventually we come to a fork in the road when we’re faced with a choice. Is our story just a story — or is it who we are? If we continue to allow our childhood pain, or any pain for that matter, to define us and serve as the reason for living a compromised life, then we’ll forever be stuck in a victim mentality.   Barrie Davenport 
• Limitation,  Transcendence

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Let go of the story of your past and imagine a new future    

• “When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.” Chuck Palahniuk 
• If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want. Paulo Coelho
• Once you start recognizing the truth of your story, finish the story. It happened but you’re still here, you’re still capable, powerful, you’re not your circumstance. It happened, and you made it through. You’re still fully equipped with every single tool you need to fulfill your purpose. Steve Maraboli
• The future,  Imagination

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By letting go of ours stories, we become free    

• This is true freedom: Stepping out of your story. Eckhart Tolle
• Who would you be without your story? You never know until you inquire. There is no story that is you or that leads to you. Every story leads away from you. Turn it around; undo it. You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood. Byron Katie 
• Letting go,  Freedom

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By letting go of our stories, we can let go of unhappiness    

• Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it. Eckhart Tolle
• It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Haruki Murakami
• Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. Eckhart Tolle
• Unhappiness

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By letting go of our stories, love flows more easily    

• Love is who we are without our stories. Byron Katie
• Without your story, love would flow naturally. Byron Katie
• Go with the flow

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By letting go of our story, we become happier and more available    

• Who would I be without my story? Pain-free, happy, and totally available if someone needs me.  Byron Katie 
• Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. Margaret Atwood 
• Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it. Eckhart Tolle
• Happiness

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Let go of your story by examining it rather than suppressing it    

• I have often seen in spiritual circles that instead of a real examination of our storylines, there is a tendency to suppress the story. In that suppression, the story may seem to be removed, but there is still no peace. You cannot rest in the beauty and transcendence of yourself while suppressing the story of yourself. Gangaji

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Let go of your story about being a victim …    

• I don’t want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego. Eckhart Tolle
• People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future. Chuck Palahniuk 
• Sometimes when you’re in a bad mood, it’s tempting to cling to a story that justifies it, and then retell it over and over like a picture book you’ve heard a million times. And then he said this…And then I did this…And then I messed up… Visualize yourself closing a book and taking a new one off the shelf. Then start telling yourself a different story—one where you’re not a victim, one where you’re not powerless, one where you’re accepting what happened and moving on so you don’t lose anymore time to that other book. Lori Deschene 
• Victim mentality

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… and become the creator of your story instead    

• There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again. Steve Maraboli

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Let go of your story about being or needing to be perfect    

• We are born perfect, and we will die perfect. The problem is that we create that character in our story that we pretend to be, or that we want to be, and we cannot hide that from ourselves. We know that we are pretending to be what we are not in the name of perfection. Don Miguel Ruiz

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Let go of your story about being in control    

• For people who are tired of the pain, nothing could be worse than trying to control what can’t be controlled. If you want real control, drop the illusion of control; let life have you. It does anyway. You’re just telling the story about how it doesn’t. Byron Katie 
• Control

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Let go of your story of need and dependency    

• Romantic love is the story of how you need another person to complete you. It’s an absolutely insane story. My experience is that I don’t need anyone to complete me. As soon as I realize that, everyone completes me. Byron Katie

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Let go of your story of blame    

• Don’t rehash the story. Blame never accomplishes anything. Don’t get addicted to your story: Why you got fired or how unlucky you are. It will hold you back. There is no shame or embarrassment to be had. Every successful person has lost a job at some stage. Instead of feeling shame, honor this as just a life change that will make you stronger. Stick around optimistic people, not victim circles. Ask yourself, “Who are you not thinking of that can help you?” And also, “Who is holding you back?”  Ariane de Bonvoisin 
• Everyone gets a secret pleasure from resentments, from being the martyr or the victim, and from feeling misunderstood, unappreciated, etc… To undo the ego, one must be willing to abandon this payoff game, with its grandstanding of emotions and repetitive rehashing of data and stories to justify its positions…  When the ‘inner juice’ is abandoned, it is replaced by inner peace.  David Hawkins 
• Let your feelings flow freely, accept each one of them, know that they are your feelings and no one is to blame for them. Live from your essence and watch your feelings flow; only when you accept them can you understand the story of your life. Patricia Selbert
• Blaming

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Let go of the story that everyone is meant to stay in your life    

• When people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who leaves you, and it doesn’t mean they are bad people. It just means that their part in your story is over. Tony McCollum

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Let go of society’s stories of how you should live    

• Ignore society’s comparisons. Constantly checking your life against one of society’s prewritten stories of how things ‘should’ be is a phony way of living.  One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Do it now.  Paulo Coelho 

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Step out of your story by realising that who you really are is the witness to it, rather than the actor    

• Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. Ram Dass

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Step out of your story by being present in the moment rather than the past    

• Living is not the story of your life. Living is the process of experiencing right now. Werner Erhart
• Stopping first occurs by recognizing the activity of the mind and not following it. Not following mind activity is different from resisting the mind or repressing thoughts. Not following thought has a relaxing, opening quality. Although it may feel unfamiliar, and the fear of the unfamiliar may in itself generate mind activity, to stop following thoughts is effortless. In following thoughts and further spinning our stories, the simple and profound ease of being is overlooked. Gangaji
• When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past & future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love. Eckhart Tolle 
• When you are feeling anxiety ask yourself this question: What is happening right now? Bring yourself back to what is actually happening in this moment…. the simple sights, sounds, smells, touch… Take a deep breath… Notice how often the anxiety you are feeling is based on a story you are telling yourself of what may happen in the future… and not the reality of what is actually happening in this moment.  Brian Piergrossi 
• What is THIS moment like when I experience it without a story? Without checking with mind about what anything means or doesn’t mean? Without going into past or future? Without trying to understand or get anything? What is the storyless NOW like? Only one way to find out. Michael Jeffreys
• Live in the present,  The past

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Step out of your story through the practice of mindfulness and meditation    

• Experiencing pain can often trigger unhelpful and negative thoughts… “This is never going to end,” “This is just going to get worse,” or “I can’t bear this.” In turn, these thoughts lead to anxiety, depression or anger, because we tend to believe the stories we think when we are unmindful, and this further adds to our suffering. The practice of Mindfulness includes becoming aware of our thoughts and seeing that our thoughts are indeed just thoughts and are not facts.  This can be quite a liberating discovery.  Richard Hanson 
• Just go into the room, sit in the centre of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat.  You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.  Ajahn Chah 
• Mindfulness,  Meditation

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People meet each through their stories of each other and none of these stories are real    

• My love is my business; it has nothing to do with you. You love me, and that isn’t personal. You tell the story that I am this, or I am that, and you fall in love with your story. What do I have to do with it? I am here for your perception, as if I had a choice. I am your story, no more and no less. You have never met me. No one has ever met anyone. Byron Katie 
• But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies. Orson Scott Card 

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What someone thinks of you is just their story and there’s no need to take it personally …    

• Most personal attacks are driven by the attacker’s own fears of failure or loss, and those fears are their problem. Just because they cast you as the bad guy doesn’t mean you are. That is just their story. Kim Giles
• What someone thinks about you is just their story. You do not have to believe the story. You do not have to take it on, adopt it or own it, because doing so will only create unnecessary suffering in your life. Kim Giles

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… or to buy into it    

• Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be caused by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a story that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power. Byron Katie 

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Story telling is a language of its own    

• It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical arguments, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. Madeleine L’Engle
• Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart. Stephen R. Lawhead 
• Language

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Stories never really end    

• All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged — after all, what’s good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it’s a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot. Mary Ann Shaffer
• And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Erin Morgenstern
• I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.  Gilda Radner 
• If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. Orson Welles
• It is the story that matters not just the ending. Paul Lockhart 
• People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. Steven Spielberg 
• A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Graham Greene 
• There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. Frank Herbert 
• Perhaps you’re not finished with your story, and who knows if you’ll ever finish it or not. Honestly, it’s not that important. Don Miguel Ruiz
• Real love stories never have endings. Richard Bach     
• Stories never really end…even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page. Cornelia Funke 
• Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. Gilda Radner    
• When there’s a disappointment, I don’t know if it’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Pema Chodron
• There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there’s loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another. Charlie Kaufman 

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Stories are the everyday stuff of everyone’s life, writ large    

• It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it. Tom Hiddleston 

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In today’s world we are bombarded with stories    

• We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many authorities, none of which are our own. The parable of the postmodern mind is the person surrounded by a media center: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we’re saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don’t have a point of view and we don’t have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside. Sam Keen

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Thoughts on stories and happy endings    

• (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I’m not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there’s a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride 
• Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths… The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he’s been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that… But the second kind, they show you life more like it is… The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up. Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light 
• If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. Orson Welles
• Stories don’t always have happy endings. This stopped him. Because they didn’t, did they? That’s one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect.  Patrick Ness 
• October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content. Neil Gaiman 

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Thoughts on stories and faith    

• It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical arguments, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. Madeleine L’Engle
• Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both. Criss Jami
• Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical. Dan Brown 
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• ‘A dog bites a man’—that’s a story; ‘A man bites a dog’—that’s a good story… Jesse Lynch Williams
• A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven’t. Irvin Cobb
• A good storyteller never lets the facts get in the way. Dave Allen
• A simple story however inaccurate or misleading is preferred to a complicated explanation however true. Koppett’s Observation
• Don’t make a long story short just so you can tell another one.
• Ducking for apples – change one letter and it’s the story of my life. Dorothy Parker
• Editor: The fellow who makes a long story short.
• Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first- hand knowledge. Erwin Knoll
• Fable: A story told by a teenager arriving home after curfew.
• Hold it. You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see the three bears eat the three little pigs, and then the bears join up with the big bad wolf and eat Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood! Tell me a story like that, OK? Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes 
• I don’t date older women because it takes too long to listen to their life story.
• I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it. Mae West
• If I rescued a child from drowning the press would no doubt headline the story: …”Benn Grabs Child.”   Tony Benn
• If they ever do my life story, whoever plays me needs lots of hair color and high heels. Charlize Theron
• If you’ve heard this story before don’t stop me because I’d like to hear it again. Groucho Marx
• It’s a damn good story; if you have any comments write them on the back of a check. Erle Stanley Gardner
• Nowadays, the perfect crime is getting caught and then selling your story to TV. Alfred E. Neuman 
• Old age is when your memory is shorter and your stories are longer.
• People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story. Jim Butcher 
• Scars are tattoos with better stories. Toyota advertisement 
• Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared. Jack Handey
• Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying ‘You gave me the wrong key! Anaïs Nin
• Speaking of things that’ll make your head explode Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story finally made it to the drive-in. Joe Bob Briggs
• Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story. Ashleigh Brilliant
• Tell me the story of that frock Judy it’s obviously an old favorite; you were wise to remove the curtain rings. Barry Humphries
• The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one. Sid Caesar
• We have a whole religion based on a woman who really stuck to her story. Greg Giraldo
• We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax. Samuel Goldwyn
• Whatever story you’re telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, “and then everything burst into flames.” Brian P. Cleary
• When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead. Susan Elizabeth Phillips
• When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book. Mary Higgins Clark 
• You know what a storyteller is, don’t you? It’s a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don’t. Sandra Dallas 

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