Some More Quotes About the Power of Stories

'Stories are a different kind of true.'

― Emma Donoghue

'There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.'

― Maya Angelou

'Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.'

― Chuck Palahniuk

'Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.'

― Terry Pratchett

'The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.'

― C.G. Jung

'If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.'

― Virginia Woolf

'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

'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

'It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.'

― Haruki Murakami

'Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.'

― Ben Okri

'That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.'

― Tim O'Brien

'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

'Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.'

― Hilary Mantel

'There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place.'

― J.K. Rowling

'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

'There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.'

― Stephen King

'Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.'

― China Miéville

'Perhaps some day 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

'We're all stories, in the end.'

― Steven Moffat

'A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.'

― Chuck Palahniuk

'Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.'

― Joss Whedon

'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

'Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.'

― Madeleine L'Engle

'When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.'

― Susan Elizabeth Phillips

'People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.'

― Terry Pratchett

'...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