"... If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it."
— Shannon Hale (The Goose Girl)

"Story telling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Host)

"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 (Keeping a Rendezvous)

"Imagination is a gift. Don't waste it!"
— Jeanne Warnes

"All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story. "
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"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

"By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"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. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together. "
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"Stories are like spiders, with all they 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 (Anansi Boys)

"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"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 (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"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 (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not."
— Michael Shermer

"Chronicler shook his head and Bast gave a frustrated sigh. 'How about plays? Have you seen The Ghost and the Goosegirl or The Ha'penny King?

Chronicler frowned. 'Is that the one where the king sells his crown to an orphan boy?'

Bast nodded. 'And the boy becomes a better king than the original. The goosegirl dresses like a countess and everyone is stunned by her grace and charm.' He hesitated, struggling to find the words he wanted. 'You see, there's a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.'

Chronicler relaxed a bit, sensing familiar ground. 'That's basic psychology. You dress a beggar in fine clothes, people treat him like a noble, and he lives up to their expectations.'

'That's only the smallest piece of it,' Bast said. 'The truth is deeper than that. It's . . .' Bast floundered for a moment. '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.'

Frowning, Chronicler opened his mouth, but Bast held up a hand to stop him. 'No, listen. I've got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she's beautiful, she'll think you're sweet, but she won't believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding.' Bast gave a grudging shrug. 'And sometimes that's enough.'

His eyes brightened. 'But there's a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you . . .' Bast gestured excitedly. 'Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn't seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.'

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' Chronicler snapped. 'You're just spouting nonsense now.'

'I'm spouting too much sense for you to understand,' Bast said testily. 'But you're close enough to see my point.'"
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"To see that you life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Gifts)

"A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood."
— Marcus Sedgwick

"The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones."
— Joseph Bruchac

"You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story."
— Patricia Briggs (The Hob's Bargain)

"hither,hither, from thy home,airy sprite, i bid thee come! born of roses, fed on dew, charms and potions canst thow brew? bring me here, with elfin speed,the fragment philter witch i need; make it sweet and swift and stong, spirite amserw now my song

"hither i come, from my airy home, afar silver moon. take magic spell, and use it well. or its powers will vanish soon!'"
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women Book One Book and Charm)

"Nor could I fail to recall my friendship with Howard K. Beale, professor of American History at the University of North Carolina. There he was, one day in 1940, standing just outside my room in the men’s dormitory at St. Augustine’s, in his chesterfield topcoat, white silk scarf, and bowler hat, with his calling card in hand, perhaps looking for a silver tray in which to drop it. Paul Buck, whom he knew at Harvard, had told him to look me up. He wanted to invite me to his home in Chapel Hill to have lunch or dinner and to meet his family. From that point on we saw each other regularly.
After I moved to Durham, he invited me each year to give a lecture on “The Negro in American Social Thought” in one of his classes. One day when I was en route to Beale’s class, I encountered one of his colleagues, who greeted me and inquired where I was going. I returned the greeting and told him that I was going to Howard Beale’s class to give a lecture. After I began the lecture I noticed that Howard was called out of the class. He returned shortly, and I did not give it another thought. Some years later, after we both had left North Carolina, Howard told me that he had been called out to answer a long-distance phone call from a trustee of the university who had heard that a Negro was lecturing in his class. The trustee ordered Beale to remove me immediately. In recounting this story, Beale told me that he had said that he was not in the habit of letting trustees plan his courses, and he promptly hung up. Within a few years Howard accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. A favorite comment from Chapel Hill was that upon his departure from North Carolina, blood pressures went down all over the state.

Chapter IX, From Slavery to Freedom
"
— John Hope Franklin (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin)

"The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him"
— Thomas Ligotti

""I did everything wrong," he said. "I misunderstood everything. Moon Child gave me so much, and all I did with it was harm, harm to myself and harm to Fantastica."

Dame Eyola gave him a long look.

"No," she said. "I don't believe so. You went the way of wishes, and that is never straight. You went the long way around, but that was your way. And do you know why? Because you are one of those who can't go back until they have found the fountain from which springs the Water of Life. And that's the most secret place in Fantastica. There's no simple way of getting there."

After a short silence she added: "But every way that leads there is the right one."
— Michael Ende

"MASTERED by desire impulsive,
By a mighty inward urging,
I am ready now for singing,
Ready to begin the chanting
Of our nation's ancient folk-song
Handed down from by-gone ages.
In my mouth the words are melting,
From my lips the tones are gliding,
From my tongue they wish to hasten;
When my willing teeth are parted,
When my ready mouth is opened,
Songs of ancient wit and wisdom
Hasten from me not unwilling.

Golden friend, and dearest brother,
Brother dear of mine in childhood,
Come and sing with me the stories,
Come and chant with me the legends,
Legends of the times forgotten,
Since we now are here together,
Come together from our roamings.
Seldom do we come for singing,
Seldom to the one, the other,
O'er this cold and cruel country,
O'er the poor soil of the Northland.
Let us clasp our hands together
That we thus may best remember.
Join we now in merry singing,
Chant we now the oldest folk-lore,
That the dear ones all may hear them,
That the well-inclined may hear them,
Of this rising generation.
These are words in childhood taught me,
Songs preserved from distant ages,
Legends they that once were taken
From the belt of Wainamoinen,
From the forge of Ilmarinen,
From the sword of Kaukomieli,
From the bow of Youkahainen,
From the pastures of the Northland,
From the meads of Kalevala.
These my dear old father sang me
When at work with knife and hatchet
These my tender mother taught me
When she twirled the flying spindle,
When a child upon the matting
By her feet I rolled and tumbled.

Incantations were not wanting
Over Sampo and o'er Louhi,
Sampo growing old in singing,
Louhi ceasing her enchantment.
In the songs died wise Wipunen,
At the games died Lemminkainen.
There are many other legends,
Incantations that were taught me,
That I found along the wayside,
Gathered in the fragrant copses,
Blown me from the forest branches,
Culled among the plumes of pine-trees,
Scented from the vines and flowers,
Whispered to me as I followed
Flocks in land of honeyed meadows,
Over hillocks green and golden,
After sable-haired Murikki,
And the many-colored Kimmo.
Many runes the cold has told me,
Many lays the rain has brought me,
Other songs the winds have sung me;
Many birds from many forests,
Oft have sung me lays n concord
Waves of sea, and ocean billows,
Music from the many waters,
Music from the whole creation,
Oft have been my guide and master.
Sentences the trees created,
Rolled together into bundles,
Moved them to my ancient dwelling,
On the sledges to my cottage,
Tied them to my garret rafters,
Hung them on my dwelling-portals,
Laid them in a chest of boxes,
Boxes lined with shining copper.
Long they lay within my dwelling
Through the chilling winds of winter,
In my dwelling-place for ages.

Shall I bring these songs together
From the cold and frost collect them?
Shall I bring this nest of boxes,
Keepers of these golden legends,
To the table in my cabin,
Underneath the painted rafters,
In this house renowned and ancient?
Shall I now these boxes open,
Boxes filled with wondrous stories?
Shall I now the end unfasten
Of this ball of ancient wisdom,
These ancestral lays unravel?"
— Elias Lönnrot (Kalevala)

"Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next."
— Adam Johnson

"To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over. And even when it's over, even when it's somebody else's life, somebody who lived a hundred years ago, whose story I've heard told time and again, while I'm hearing it I hope and fear as if I didn't know how it would end; and so I live the story and it lives in me. That's as good a way as I know to outwit death. Stories are what death thinks he puts and end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but the don't end with him. Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Gifts)

"ada yg pernah baca buku karangan Dr. Lang ga?"
— Dr. Lang

"It's a very remarkable story."
"Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away."
— James Hilton (Random Harvest)

"Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.

One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around."
— Peter Watts (Maelstrom)

"I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"My Splendid Concubine, historical fiction by Lloyd Lofthouse
“I was struck by the beauty of the cover, and I certainly was not disappointed by the book’s contents. A fascinating illumination of nineteenth-century Chinese culture and the complex Englishman Robert Hart, the father of China’s modernization. Hart’s struggles adapting to Chinese culture, always feeling the pull and force of his Victorian British background, are compelling. His relationships with his concubine and his concubine’s sister are poignant—the novel is as much a study of the complexities of love as it is anything else. A powerful novel whose beauty exceeds that of the book’s cover.” Writer’s Digest judge, 2008

"
— Writer's Digest judge, 2008

"A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar."
— Adam Johnson

"A House For Mr.Biswas

"
— Nepal) Sri Rudravarna Mahavihara (Patan (Documents from the Rudravarna-Mahavihara, Patan)

"He clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence"
— Jose Maria Merino