Top 500 Quotes About Stories (2025 Update)
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201. “All the truth in the world is held in stories.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

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

— Ram Dass

203. “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

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

— Bruce Springsteen

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

— Lysa TerKeurst

206. “There is no story that is not true.”

— Chinua Achebe

207. “The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”

— Julio Cortázar

208. “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”

— Ben Okri

209. “The truth of the story lies in the details.”

— Paul Auster

210. “You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

211. “Do not dump your woes upon people – keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them.”

— Elbert Hubbard

212. “Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

213. “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

— Arundhati Roy

214. “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

216. “A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters.”

— Julio Cortázar

217. “After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.”

— Ernest Hemingway

218. “By coming forward and sharing your story, you don’t know the countless lives you change.”

— Mariska Hargitay

219. “Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new.”

— Salman Rushdie

220. “I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

221. “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”

— Isak Dinesen

222. “While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”

— Jeffrey Archer

223. “When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.”

— Rumi

224. “The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

225. “I like stories with lots of psychology.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

226. “No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It’s never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

— Cormac McCarthy

227. “Tarot is just stories on cards.”

— Erin Morgenstern

228. “The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.”

— Zadie Smith

229. “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.”

— George Saunders

230. “I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”

— Yann Martel

231. “When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

232. “A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

233. “Great stories move through fear.”

— Donald Miller

234. “If I want a long boring story with no point to it, I have my life.”

— Jerry Seinfeld

235. “Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.”

— Criss Jami

236. “A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.”

— Isabel Allende

237. “I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

— Jack Kerouac

238. “I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.”

— Leo Tolstoy

239. “The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.”

— Donald Miller

240. “Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.”

— Ben Okri

241. “Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.”

— Italo Calvino

242. “Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”

— John Ruskin

243. “Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’”

— Salman Rushdie

244. “The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.”

— Stephen King

245. “I really believe it’s the moments we can’t talk about that become the rest of our lives. It’s the moments we can’t process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

246. “Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told.”

— Henry David Thoreau

247. “All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.”

— Michael Scott

248. “The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands – all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

249. “Politics always change. Stories never do.”

— Stephen King

250. “Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

— Yann Martel