A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.
The first law of story-telling. Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ''Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.''
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.