#stories

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#childhood #literature #reading #stories #words

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death #end #enough #far #keep

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#on-fiction #stories #truth #writing #fiction

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. ↗

— Rudyard Kipling

#form #history #never #stories #taught

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

#storytelling #storytelling

And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise. ↗

— Erin Morgenstern

#end #happy-endings #life #stories #dreams

Frodo: I can't do this, Sam. Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam? Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#holding-on #lord-of-the-rings #sam-gamgee #stories #chance

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#stories #fairies

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother. ↗

— John Connolly

#fantasy #stories #fairies

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#africa #pilot #stories #women #doubt