Stories Told Quotes & Sayings

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told. — Azar Nafisi

He mostly told me stories at night-time, in the near darkness of the room, and I gradually burrowed into the world his words created. — Chigozie Obioma

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life. — Moshe Kasher

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite. — Anne Enright

The primary narrative that forms our ministry models draws from our evangelical success stories. We are presented with triumphalistic narratives that minimize stories of struggle. Our historical reflection reveals an obsession with success and celebration while stories of survival and suffering are ignored. History is often told by the victorious and therefore favors them. In — Soong-Chan Rah

People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told. — Lynne Tillman

The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something. — Tessa Hadley

He was a good storyteller, but he told the kind of stories that made children run away from the village and adults look for a length of rope and some soap. — Sorin Suciu

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men
that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex. — Susan Fletcher

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm. — Tanith Lee

I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn't
have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form.
If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability. — Orson Scott Card

I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said) — C.S. Lewis

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. — Oscar Wilde

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead. — Helen Humphreys

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

There was one knight," said Meera, "in the year of the false spring. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, they called him. He might have been a crannogman, that one." "Or not." Jojen's face was dappled with green shadows. "Prince Bran has heard that tale a hundred times, I'm sure." "No," said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to — George R R Martin

It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story.
("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER) — Jerome K. Jerome

THE MIGRANT PEOPLE , scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes. And it came about in the camps along the roads, on the ditch banks beside the streams, under the sycamores, that the story teller grew into being, so that the people gathered in the low firelight to hear the gifted ones. And they listened while the tales were told, and their participation made the stories great. — John Steinbeck

He. Does there have to be a he? It seems weak and unoriginal doesn't it, for stories told by girls to always have a he? — Rinsai Rossetti

They always told each other about the parts of the day they had spent apart, sketching in detail so the other could see it, so it became a memory they seemed to share in common. They were good at talking. Sharing stories. Everything he did only seemed to take root when he told her about it. There were times when he arrived home as breathless as an inspired poet with the urgency to talk to her. — Glenn Haybittle

The first generation of therapists doing this work were told by their clients that the one massive cult was everywhere, knew everything, had access to state-of-the-art technology, and was willing to kill both clients and therapists to stop the information from getting out." []
"The reality is that even before stories of ritual abuse and mind control began coming out to therapists, the groups had agreed on what kind of disinformation to spread, so that clients would be afraid to tell their therapists what had happened to them, and therapists would be afraid to work with these clients." [ ]
"We know that there is not one massive Satanic cult, but many different interrelated groups, including religious, military/political, and organized crime, using mind control on children and adult survivors. We know that there are effective treatments. We know that many of the paralyzing beliefs our clients lived by are the results of lies and tricks perpetrated by their abusers. — Alison Miller

It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well. — Cameron Crowe

I'm no actor. And I wasn't like George Lucas or Spielberg, making home movies as a teenager, either. But I would go back and watch certain movies again and again. By the time I saw 'The Graduate' I was aware of how these amazing stories could be told. — Nancy Meyers

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens. — Tess Gerritsen

So what I am always looking for is, I'm always looking for something that that person has told me that nobody else has told me. It is normally not an opinion, and it is normally not a philosophy. It's almost always a story. Because we all share similar philosophies, we all share similar opinions on a lot of different issues, but all of our stories are our own. — Brandon Stanton

History belongs to she who holds the pen ... If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told. — Julianne Malveaux

Stories," she blurted. "The mosaic told stories, didn't it?"
"Yes, old ones."
"I'll tell them to you."
His eyes cracked open. He didn't remember closing them. "You know those tales?"
"Yes."
She didn't. This became clear as she began to tell them. She knew bits and pieces, cobbled together in ways that would have made him smile if smiling didn't hurt. "You," he breathed, "are such a faker."
"Don't interrupt."
Mostly pure invention. She remembered the images--it pleased him, how vividly she knew the temple floor's details. Which god curled around which, or how the snake's tongue forked into three. But the stories she told had little to do with his religion. Sometimes they didn't even make sense.
"Do this again," he said, "when I have strength to laugh."
"As bad as that?"
"Mmm. Maybe not. For a Valorian. — Marie Rutkoski

But most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.
But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious. — Leo Tolstoy

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told. — Ciaran Carson

They were guilty of too much belief in a story they were told. Most people are able to hold most stories they're told in abeyance, to keep a little distance between the story and their inmost heart. — Orson Scott Card

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories. — Madeleine L'Engle

Stories are told to make you feel something, and they can tell ours over and over again, and every time it will be something different. — A.C. Gaughen

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. — Bill Lambrecht

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. — Terry Pratchett

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering. — Erin Gruwell

There's so many ways to be a voice and that's what I'm figuring out. Being an artist, being an actor, it's about telling stories that could heal, that could open up discussion that could make the community better. There are many (Latino) stories that need to be told and haven't been told right. If I could help be that voice then that's what I'm going to do, because this is a reality for me. — Richard Cabral

Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource. — Charles Dickens

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium. — Mark Helprin

If I told you the whole story it would never end ... What's happened to me has happened to a thousand woman. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Oh no, princess. I would never carry out anything which could harm your being. This was just something I was told to say. I'm not sure what is planned, if, you go against their wishes. But, I'm sure you're smart and won't test them. — Chayada Welljaipet

Home should never be dark or full of shadows and secrets. It should be bright and full of open doors. It should be full of stories wanting to be told. — Travis Thrasher

Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore... — Ana Claudia Antunes

It was a wonderful experience to work with Sylvia. She pushed me to be more powerful with my acting, and she told me scores of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. She is amazing. — Lukas Haas

Patti Callahan Henry's THE STORIES WE TELL is a lyrical exploration of love and longing, secrets and suspicion, family and friendship, all told with the author's trademark insights into the hollows and curves of the heart and mind of a working woman who must balance the demands of motherhood, wifedom, sisterhood, and yes, the deepest cravings for artistic expression. I always love the stories PCH tells! — Mary Kay Andrews

Hen, there's such a temptation to just constantly write things that are going to make the fans happy. Sometimes it takes a little bit of unhappiness to make those happy pay-offs work better. That's something that is fascinating to us and I think has really changed the way that stories are told. — Jeff Pinkner

In a society where dirt sells, for every good story told as it is, you will hear the whole of that day's 10 bad stories sensationalized; although in reality, it could be that 100 good deeds happened that day which went unsung. — Criss Jami

It's my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians. — Wynne McLaughlin

The best stories are universal stories that have been told for as long as humanity has existed it's just figuring out new ways to do it, with language, with structure. And so I'm always trying to do that. — James Frey

My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [ ... ] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us. — Steven Spielberg

The others set up all this because they want me to know that what I did was important - important enough to burn coal.

But it doesn't feel important. Not like it should.

I'm reminded now, watching the coals burn, of why I never feel like I truly belong to Winter. I want to understand all this as deeply as Sir and Alysson and everyone else, a reminder of a time when everything was how it should be, but all this is wasted on me, someone whose only connection to Winter lies in stories told by others. I thought that if I had a hand in saving Winter, I'd feel like I deserve it, the kingdom everyone else remembers. I thought I could fill the void left by my lack of memories with purpose. That's what I've always told myself: if I matter to Winter, Winter will matter to me. And today I mattered to my kingdom.

Then why don't I feel anything more for the fire pit than the slight burn on my finger? — Sara Raasch

When I was growing up, my mom told me every story that was happening to her. Most of the stories that come to me are through a female voice in my head. My stories seem to naturally be about females. — Natalie Portman

He'd been told that women were sensitive about such things, as if a scar could somehow ruin their beauty, but scars were just stories told in flesh ... — Larry Correia

I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything-your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world's suffering — Vaddey Ratner

It had always fascinated him that she'd consumed so many words, that her head was full of stories, told a thousand different ways. — Sarah Addison Allen

And must not all stories of brave lives and long endeavours and weary watching for the ideal so end, until all be ended?
I cannot tell you whether he found what he sought. I have told you that he sought it. — G.K. Chesterton

Everything we know has come from stories that have been told over and over again as truth. Those stories turn into history. — Oliver Jeffers

Another common practice, the reps told us, was to take fancy meals to the entire doctor's office (one of the perks of being a nurse or receptionist, I suppose). One doctor's office even required alternating days of steak and lobster for lunch if the reps wanted access to the doctors. Even more shocking, we found out that physicians sometimes called the reps into the examination room (as an "expert") to directly inform patients about the way certain drugs work. Hearing stories from the reps who sold medical devices was even more disturbing. We learned that it's common practice for device reps to peddle their medical devices in the operating room in real time and while a surgery is under way. Janet and I were surprised at how well the pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. — Dan Ariely

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told. — Colum McCann

I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things - genre paintings, historical paintings - the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society. — Kara Walker

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It don't move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. — Cormac McCarthy

We have to be really sensitive to making sure were not creating any stories that don't feel like they're ready to be told ... We have to make sure we're getting the right story and the right content from the talent we work with. — Diane Nelson

There's not a lot of stories for women told by women in a very real, true voice. — Heather Graham

A mourner is, perforce, a person with a story. The pity is, how very rarely it gets told. — Christian McEwen

Johanna sat by the fire every night and worked on her tapestry. Dumfries waited until she was settled in her chair and then draped himself across her feet. It became a ritual for Alex to squeeze himself up next to her and fall asleep during her stories about fierce warriors and fair maidens. Johanna's tales all had a unique twist, for none of the heroines she told stories about ever needed to be rescued by their knights in shining armor. More often than not, the fair maidens rescued their knights.
Gabriel couldn't take issue with his wife. She was telling Alex the truth. It was a fact that maidens could rescue mighty, arrogant warriors. Johanna had certainly rescued him from a bleak, cold existence. She'd given him a family and a home. She was his love, his joy, his companion.
She was his saving grace. — Julie Garwood

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told. — Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Have I told you about Christ?" "Ghost-born-man-walking-on-water-telling-stories-dead-on-tree. — Robert Holdstock

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. — Neil Gaiman

African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham. — Douglas A. Blackmon

He liked the girls, liked to hold them around the waist, felt like a man when he did. But as for talking with them, no, no! Then he felt as though he were dealing with another species of human being, in some cases a higher one, in others a lower. He secretly admired the weak, pale, little girl and had picked her to be his wife. That was still the only way he could think of a woman - as a wife. He danced in a very chaste and proper manner, but he heard awful stories about his pals, stories he didn't understand until later. They could dance the waltz backwards around the room in a very indecent way, and they told naughty stories about the girls. — August Strindberg

I lost my voice and my best friend too
On swift, fierce winds and wings of blue,
The cold rain fell where beams had shone,
So I wrapped up tight and safe. Alone.

But I missed my friend, I missed my voice,
And my heart still whispered of another choice
To break out of my binding, safe, and warm,
And see what the world looked like after the storm.

So I struggled free and was greeted by
Colorful brushstrokes across the sky,
The melody of the summer breeze
And blue wings like mine in hazel trees.

On the soft, sweet air of the mountain glade,
We gathered together in cool, green shade,
And told our stories, beginnings to ends,
And found our song in the hearts of new friends. — Elaine Vickers

Some people think we're made of flesh and blood and bones. Scientists say we're made of atoms. But I think we are made of stories. When we die, that's what people remember, the stories of our lives and the stories that we told. — Ruth Stotter

He thought of the deep crevasses and windy caves of Underlay, and the stories of the creatures that dwelt there. Of course, he didn't believe in them. He'd told them, because the handing on of an oral mythology was very important to a developing culture, but he didn't believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn't believe in him. — Terry Pratchett

Someone once told me that the most dynamic actors are people who have stories. People who have lived life. People with experiences. — Emmanuelle Chriqui

But the stories you told yourself
which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer
were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned a few afternoons long, in the end. — Jonathan Lethem

I actually thought 'Desperate Housewives' finished very well. I just think there's still stories to be told. I feel like I get that from fans that they weren't done watching those people's lives. — Teri Hatcher

I would love to make some kind of film about the witches and the Inquisitions. That would be really fun because I don't think their stories have been told enough. — Amy Smart

It was not the time to recall all those really horrifying nursery stories she'd read, Bluebeard, Babes in the Wood, Little Red Riding Hood. Why is it that children's stories are so filled with monsters like wolves and witches who eat children, and men who kill their wives? And to think, that people actually sat and told their children such things. — Karen Ranney

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself. — Erin Morgenstern

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women. — Edna O'Brien

But there are other stories waiting to be told, and they will be lost one day, too. Whatever the case, it's all beneath your feet, right now. — Brian Selznick

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared. — Erin Morgenstern

Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence. — Michael Ondaatje

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here. — Sue Monk Kidd

We are each born into a situation - a particular body (its race, sex, health ... ), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation - and born into the stories told of each of these. — Lewis Hyde

In Harlan, Kentucky, we told stories the way some people play music ... In the mountains, storytelling is truly an art form, and as much recreation as communication. — Maxine Cheshire

I had two primary cancers, which was pretty unusual. And when I got the second one, people told me such terrible bad-news stories, they instigated fears that weren't there in the first place. I do remember with such gratitude one doctor saying to me, 'Two primaries? That's nothing. I've seen a patient with six.' — Sam Taylor-Wood

Hillary Clinton's been around for 30 years. Why do these stories need to be told? It isn't all of this widely known? — Rush Limbaugh

We sat down and told stories that happened to us in our childhood, to our children. They were all basically based on the truth. These stories were funny and poignant to us. They just took off. These are all stories from my life. — Howie Mandel

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history. — Antonio Tabucchi

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

I cannot imagine where we would have been without BET. Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows. — Al Sharpton

I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse. — Leonora Carrington

Carl constantly told horror stories of cursing and beatings from his father and the twenty-four-hour blackout screaming of his alcoholic, pill-popping mother. He used his trauma like a caution sign for what he could do if I didn't silence my backtalk. — Maggie Young

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories. Throughout — Jeff VanderMeer

We do not know if she collapsed because of overwhelming joy, extreme surprise, grave disappointment, or heavy anxiety that for the next months and years she would live with a human male, because in fact she had been honest when she told her girlfriends that she had given up on men, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE. — Kyoko Yoshida

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born. — Jill Lepore

Most of the things that I remember from childhood wouldn't make a particularly good story: rescuing worms during rainstorms, our schnauzer attacking a wheel of cheese when someone dropped it during dinner, my parents tricking us into riding Space Mountain at Disney World (we thought it was an educational people-mover kind of ride), playing Star Wars (I got to marry Harrison Ford and my sister married Luke Skywalker) in first and second grade. On the other hand, we always had lots of interesting babysitters
seminary students and friends of my parents
who told really good ghost stories. — Kelly Link

Supposing an emperor was persuaded to wear a new suit of clothes whose material was so fine that, to the common eye, the clothes weren't there. And suppose a little boy pointed out this fact in a loud, clear voice ...
Then you have The Story of the Emperor Who Had No Clothes.
But if you knew a bit more, it would be The Story of the Boy Who Got a Well-Deserved Thrashing from His Dad for Being Rude to Royalty, and Was Locked Up.
Or The Story of the Whole Crowd Who Were Rounded Up by the Guards and Told 'This Didn't Happen, OK? Does Anyone Want to Argue?'
Or it could be a story of how a whole kingdom suddenly saw the benefit of the 'new clothes', and developed an enthusiasm for healthy sports in a lively and refreshing atmosphere which got many new adherents every year, and led to a recession caused by the collapse of the conventional clothing industry.
It could even be a story about The Great Pneumonia Epidemic of '09.
It all depends on how much you know. — Terry Pratchett

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin. — Sarah Hall