Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
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.
If it isn’t a wonderful story first, who cares how “important” it is?
Is falling in love with someone’s story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn’t work in real life. And I love my real people the most.
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.