Quotes About Power Of Stories

“He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.”

— Robert Cormier

“The stories we are told as children do, undoubtedly, mark us for life. They are often stories of dark and terrible things, and we are usually told them just before the lights are turned out and we are left alone; but we love them. We love them when we first hear them, and even when we are grown, and think we have forgotten them entirely, they never lose their power over us.”

— Neil Bartlett

“Her stories make you believe in the power
of love”

— Catherine Anderson

“I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body
flesh and bone
and from the Earth's body
stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.”

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.”

— Margi Preus

“She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”

— Kate Morton

“Fiction
good fiction, anyway
is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great ...
... and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.
THAT is why you write fiction.”

— Holly Lisle

“When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.”

— Alan Jacobs

“The point is, stories can be all lengths. Never underestimate the power of less is more.”

— Darynda Jones

“When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.”

— Arundhati Roy

“So long as the people with the power - to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket - look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia or any other -sim they've learned form stories, videos, media and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone.”

— Kameron Hurley

“Humans are storytellers. It is our nature to make up stories, to interpret everything we perceive. Without awareness, we give our personal power to the story and the story writes itself. With awareness, we recover the control of our story. We see we are the authors and if we don't like our story, we change it.”

— Miguel Ruiz

“One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn't they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. People were quick to point out the differences between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that's connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that's connected to practicing gratitude.”

— Brené Brown

“The power of owning our stories, even the difficult ones, is that we get to write the ending.”

— Brené Brown

“Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“I see hope creeping in, destabilizing old power structures. I feel it in the ground under my feet. I hear it in the stories of the people of God living right now. We're whispering to each other, eyes alight, "Aslan is on the move." Can't you feel that? The kingdom is breathing among us already.”

— Sarah Bessey

“For a blink of an eye, there was so much media glare. It was unexpected, and I don't think we realized the magnitude of the message we were imparting with 'The Nanny Diaries.' There was also this added challenge that some of the media power players whose publications were doing stories on us perceived us to be sniping at their lifestyles.”

— Emma McLaughlin

“The power of pop culture stories should not be underestimated, and there is an enormous potential for inspirational stories that can have a positive, transformative effect on our lives.”

— Anita Sarkeesian

“I've always loved the power of stories to transport me to another world, to imagine extraordinary possibilities, to experience things I may not have access to in my regular life - like being a superhero! Also, I would always put on shows for my family and the neighbors; I guess I was an actor before I even knew it.”

— Kandyse McClure

“It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.”

— Alexis Wright

“Hallmark makes beautiful films that feel as if they should be watched in a theater. The Hall family knows the power of stories, and they give us unforgettable movies with heart and depth and the resonance of classics.”

— Luanne Rice

“Women don't have to be defined by others. We have the power to define ourselves: by telling our own stories, in our own words, with our own voices.”

— Sarah Kay

“The storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning-that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere. The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow, that life itself is like a story ... it makes us listen to the storyteller with great intensity because in this way all his stories are about us and because it is always possible that he may give us some clue as to what the meaning of our lives is.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Still. Four words.
And I didn't realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:
Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children's area, what would it be?
Thanks!
Lynn
I pondered a bit. I'd said a lot about books and kids' reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:
I'm not sure I'd put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I'd just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I'd put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it's working, and that pages will be turned:
... and then what happened?”

— Neil Gaiman

“So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.”

— Neil Gaiman

“It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.”

— Stephen King

“As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria.”

— Alberto Manguel

“I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”

— George Orwell

“Many of us spent time talking with the men and women who had lived through Katrina, and we heard stories of not only individual sacrifice and loss, but also of neighbors taking care of neighbors. The power of community was so evident in New Orleans.”

— Howard Schultz

“Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.”

— Adam Ross

“The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us ...”

— Ian Stewart

“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“As the mother of six, Karen Santorum knows the power of stories to shape and mold the nature of our children. In Everyday Graces, Karen has complied a treasure chest of tales that helps us raise the next generation of children into adults of kind compassion. Everyday Graces is a must for families that desire their children to become people of character.”

— Janet Parshall

“I am expecting that consumers are going to continue and exert power and influence. The idea of radical transparency is something that few brands are taking advantage of now, and most brands fight it. I'd say that in 10 years the best brands won't be those with the best stories, sort of made up fictional stories, but those that will give an accurate and real time picture of what they are doing in the interest of the consumer, in any given time.”

— Alex Bogusky

“The power that comes from knowing the facts of history is dwarfed by the power that comes from being able to shape the stories about how that history is written and told.”

— Annie Leonard

“My works are a direct response to the typical space opera. I grew tired of always reading about how the people with power, with agency, get involved in huge sweeping arcs of stories. I wanted stories that dealt with real people, people I could relate to.”

— Nathan Lowell

“Fantasy stories open our eyes to an unseen world and train our minds to see beyond the visible. In the New Testament context, this is where our real battles are fought. Good fantasy will reveal the hidden powers of evil that threaten the hero's life and upset his journey. Good fantasy focuses on how a hero finds victory when he learns that he can't win by himself, so he submits to the higher power in faith and obedience.”

— Bryan Davis

“Writing stories has given me the power to change things I could not change as a child. I can make boys into doctors. I can make fathers stop drinking. I can make mothers stay.”

— Cynthia Rylant

“There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.”

— Lav Diaz

“We all recall the cruel stepmother in fairy tales. That archetype is often a necessary element in a fairy tale so that the heroine/hero can become a person of character and power. Stories of heroes and heroines often begin with a wound or loss or injustice and end with heroic acts of restoration.”

— David Richo

“A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.”

— Noam Chomsky

“We live in a culture bound by sin like bands of iron. Moral stories, quaint maxims, and life lessons shared from the heart of a beloved pulpiteer or spiritual life coach have no real power against such darkness. We need preachers of the gospel of Jesus Christ who know the Scriptures, and by God's grace face any culture with the cry, 'Thus saith the Lord!'”

— Paul Washer

“All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth
yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.”

— Vera Nazarian

“How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told - are really dependent on power.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie