People Places Stories Quotes & Sayings

These letters are all I have left.
26 friends to tell my stories to.
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls.
I need nothing but letters to live. Without them I would not exist.
Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I'm still alive. — Tahereh Mafi

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality. — Eric Sloane

They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That's not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It's just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them. — Dodie Smith

It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids. — Jo Walton

At home I used to walk through emotional wastelands where the lines on craggy faces were so deep that the wind whistled through them. People fell in and out of my life, but it was the places that really mattered. Even now I can feel them tugging at my sleeve and spinning around in my head. All the old stories have it wrong, because it's not the ghost that haunts the house; it's the house that haunts the ghost. I feel lost out here, and everything reminds me that I'm not quite real. In the end it's always home that damns us. — Damien Echols

There is a single truth, it filters through different stories and languages because people come from different cultures and speak different languages. And this truth has manifested itself through millennia, in multiple ways. Different people belong to different manifestations of truth. Some people take those manifestations and turn them into religions, or into gathering places or into a system. Others take those manifestations and allow that light to illuminate the paths on their inward journeys. All in all, the only reason why there is strife or hatred in any way, is because of the strife and hatred and intolerance inside of people. Truth does not call for any division or any hatred or intolerance of any kind. In order to love one thing, this does not mean we need to put down another one. — C. JoyBell C.

People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and ... well, sometimes they can't talk about them. — Alan Moore

Mr. Geronimo's life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors' peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own. — Salman Rushdie

Time is a strange storyteller. It writes, erases and rewrites endlessly. Things change, places and people become unrecognizable, but stories are repeated endlessly — Vandana Shanker

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair. — Sarah J. Maas

When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before. — Roger Ebert

I remember from my earliest years people speaking, you know, in a certain kind of rhythm and telling stories and sharing experiences in a way that was different in Indian country than it was other places. And I was really struck by this and obviously very affected by it, because it's always come out in my songs. — Robbie Robertson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The stories that bind us, Halli. The stories we live by, that dictate what we do and where we go. The stories that give us our names, our identities, the places we belong, the people we hate. — Jonathan Stroud

Before, some places just seemed too far, too difficult to reach, but once you start traveling, you never want to stop. You want to hear other people's stories, see where they live, eat their food. You realize
and of course it's a cliche, but like many cliches, it's true
the way we are all interconnected. — Rachel Friedman

I love being an illustrator because I get to read really great stories, work with amazing people, travel and see places I never would've seen. And I get to draw all the time. — Brian Selznick

That is what a motorcycle road trip is supposed to be about, long miles and short stops in obscure places with interesting people and stories to be heard. — Geoff Smith

In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons. — Jane Yolen

Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales ...
Forests are places where a person can get lost and also hide
and losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention. — Sara Maitland

But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.
Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers ... "
Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words. — Frances Hardinge

He strokes my hair and tells me stories and tucks me close like he's afraid I'll disappear. He paints pictures of people and places until I'm drowning in a drug of dreams to escape a world with no refuge, no relief, no release but his reassurances in my ear. — Tahereh Mafi

The dark man is ubiquitous. People from all times and in all places have recorded their experiences of him in stories, poems, paintings, songs, stone, dance, crafts and prayers. Saint or sinner, scientist or theologian, agnostic or true believer, it makes little difference as the dark man has walked beside us since the very beginning and he will stay with us until the end. He is so intrinsic to the human experience that everyone has at least one dark man story to tell... — Deborah Wells

It's often frustrating when you're a war reporter and you're covering these places that far away. You're frustrated by making stories that people can't connect to in any way. It's hard for Americans to connect to Arabic-speaking Iraqis in refugee camps or Pashto-speaking Afghans in the countryside, and having a character who is a vehicle through which you're allowed to make these relationships really allowed us to gain in an emotional weight that was difficult for us to do any other way to make it all human. — Rick Rowley

In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness. — David Brooks

We must also deal with the knowledge streams that filter messages about the past and the future into the minds of young people. Places of learning, both formal and non-formal, must be charged with telling stories of both despair and hope, of oppression and freedom, of reconciliation and social justice, of struggle and responsibility, of fairness and forgiveness, of ethnic nationalism and non-racial solidarity. — Jonathan Jansen

American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book...Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past...How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people...In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their life. — Fei Xiaotong

Rappers, as a class, are not engaged in anything criminal. They're musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren't task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don't have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others, don't want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not acrime, at least not one that's on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people
they'd love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can. — Jay-Z

Stories are not about ideas, gimmicks, or places. Stories are about people. People are about feelings! — Barry B. Longyear

(I)n reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely. — Natalie Babbitt

In my photographic work I'm generally attracted to places that contain memories, history, atmospheres and stories. I'm interested in the places where people have lived, worked and played. I look for traces of the past, visual fingerprints, evidence of activities - they fire my imagination and connect into my own personal experiences. Using the analogy of the theater, I would say that I like to photograph the empty stage, before or after the performance, even in between acts. I love the atmosphere of anticipation, the feeling in the air that events have happened, or will happen soon ... — Michael Kenna

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people. — Louise Brown

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn't care to sit next to in a train, people that don't exist, places you've never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader's creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive. — Ben Okri

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me. — George Saunders

Don't get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn't the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. — Tom Johnson

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not , just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere . Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation. — Hannah Arendt

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq. — Oliver North

I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Since the last tour I have done a lot of extensive travel to Iraq, Kuwait, Siberia, South Korea and other places and picked up some hopefully interesting stories. We are living in interesting times and as bad as things are, I draw considerable inspiration from some of the things I'm seeing and people I'm meeting. I'm looking forward to getting out on the road and talking about it all. — Henry Rollins

It's only a story.' As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the everchanging world. — Keith Donohue

The Things That Matter convincingly lays out Nate Berkus's philosophy that things do matter. Our homes tell our stories, they reflect the places we've been and the people we've loved along the way - and there can be no more beautiful design for living than that. — Nate Berkus

People tend to think that hate is the most dangerous emotion. But love is equally dangerous," Will said. "There are many stories of spirits haunting the places and people who meant the most to them. In fact, there are more of those than there are revenge stories. — Libba Bray

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places. — Louise Brown

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories. — Paul Auster

The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience. — Debra Dean

There are people.
There are stories.
The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.
Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies. — Alan Moore

My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter - with infinite subtlety - spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go, - and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; - and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them. — Lafcadio Hearn

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own. — Sufjan Stevens

I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down. — Susanna Clarke

I will believe in students' competence and intelligence. I will keep faith...that they have stories to tell, things to explain, and the language with which to do those things. I will reject any notion that places in my mind a belief in students' deficits -- whether those deficits be genetic, cultural, or behavioral. I will treat them as people who can get important things done for important reasons. — Randy Bomer

He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk. — Stephen King