#stories

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across--each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip--is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale. ↗

— Rabih Alameddine

#storytellers #life

. . .because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones that rose from the dark earth and sang as white birds in the trees Because the story of our life becomes our life Because each of us tells the same story but tells it differently and none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories) ↗

— Lisel Mueller

#poetry #why-we-tell-stories #life

I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories. ↗

— Herbert Rosendorfer

#life

Think of all the stories you've heard, Bast. You have a young boy, the hero. His parents are killed he sets out for vengeance. What next?" Bast hesitated, his expression puzzled. Chronicler answered the question instead. "He finds help. A clever talking squirrel. An old drunken swordsman. A mad hermit in the woods. That sort of thing." Kvothe nodded. "Exactly! He finds the mad hermit in the woods, proves himself worthy, and learns the names of all things, just like Taborlin the Great. Then with these powerful magics at his beck and call, what does he do?" Chronicler shrugged. "He finds the villains and kills them." "Of course," Kvothe said grandly. "Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give is the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#mentors #stories #simplicity

A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#daydreaming #fantasies #richelle #richelle-goodrich #stories

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family, about life, about death. ↗

— Orlando Bloom

#death #effects #explosions #family #human

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#device #i #i think #kind #projecting

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#exactly #found #how #i #just

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#back #build #collection #feel #finished

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#book #even #i #interpreter #itself