Top 500 Quotes About Stories (2024 Update)
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151. “In life, every ending is just the start of another story.”

— Julian Barnes

152. “All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they’re any good, the ending is a beginning.”

— James Clavell

153. “When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

154. “If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

155. “And in stories, endings matter.”

— Atul Gawande

156. “If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

157. “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.”

— C. S. Lewis

158. “The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.”

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

159. “If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.”

— Octavia Butler

160. “Story is the language of the heart.”

— John Eldredge

161. “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”

— John le Carré

162. “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

163. “There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

— Stephen King

164. “Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

— Ray Bradbury

165. “One story sounds good until another is told.”

— Aesop

166. “Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

— Salman Rushdie

167. “A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.”

— Eudora Welty

168. “Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

— Stephen King

169. “If you look at any ancient civilization, they’ve all used fantasy stories to train the young.”

— David Gemmell

170. “I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for – so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

171. “I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.”

— Neil Gaiman

172. “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 Estés

173. “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

174. “Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”

— Natalie Goldberg

175. “Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you’re playing a tender love story that’s set in a coffee shop or whether you’re in ‘The Avengers,’ which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.”

— Tom Hiddleston

176. “I don’t think you can write – at least not well – if you don’t love stories, love the written word.”

— Nora Roberts

177. “Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.”

— Eckhart Tolle

178. “You don’t have to live anybody else’s story.”

— Stephen Curry

179. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.”

— Chinua Achebe

180. “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.”

— Ben Okri

181. “If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”

— Terry Pratchett

182. “But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”

— Stephen King

183. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

— Joan Didion

184. “The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

185. “My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident.”

— Hans Christian Andersen

186. “Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.”

— Jeanette Winterson

187. “We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

188. “To be a person is to have a story to tell.”

— Isak Dinesen

189. “People don’t care how you feel. You need to paint pictures, you need to tell stories. That’s what people want. They want to be entertained. Then all of the other stuff kind of filters across as part of the whole thing.”

— Glenn Frey

190. “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”

— Laurie Anderson

191. “The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.”

— Toni Morrison

192. “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”

— Frederick Buechner

193. “Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

194. “All the truth in the world is held in stories.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

195. “Our scars are a witness to the world. They are apart of our story. Healed wounds that are symbols that God has restored us.”

— Louie Giglio

196. “We all have stories we’re living and telling ourselves.”

— Bruce Springsteen

197. “God invites us today to live a great story with Him.”

— Lysa TerKeurst

198. “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

199. “Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.”

— Randy Pausch

200. “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”

— Ram Dass