57 Stories Quotes

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

The seven dwarfs were each on different little trips. Happy was into grass and grass alone : Happy, that's all he did. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy, too much speed. Sneezy was a full blown coke freak. Doc was a connection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for Dopey. He's always got his arm out and his leg up. And then, the one we always forget, because he was Bashful. Bashful didn't use drugs. He was paranoid on his own. Didn't need any help on that ladder.

'Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.'

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is-full of surprises.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

I associated much of Christian doctrine with children's stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

I have two very rare photographs. One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car. The other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child.

It took me a while to realize that these stories, while ofthen used with children, are not at all children's stories. I think the devile has tricked us into thinking so much of biblical theology is story fit for kids. How did we cone to think the story of Noah's ark is appropriate for children? Can you imagine a children's book aboud Noah's ark complete with paintings of people gasping in gallons of water, mothers grasping thier children while their bodies go flying down white-rapid rivers, the children's tiny heads being bashed against rocks or hung up in fallen trees? I don't think a children's book like that would sell many copies.

I think it caught on because the stories that these four girls have individually in the book are extremely relatable. They're very real teenage experiences. I think the friendship between the four girls is something that is more realistic than a lot of the relationships we see between girls in movies lately. A lot of the time it's like backstabbing or petty or superficial. I think most girls' relationships are real friendships like these. I don't think they're that much more dramatic.

Waffles may have actually originated in a penguin tank. (Nun grabs his hand and whacks it with a ruler) Ouch!

Death: 'I have watched life's light flicker, and at once fade from their eyes as they passed from this world. I have sat silent and frightened, with tears streaming from my eyes as I tried to grasp some salient thought about the absence of their breath. I have collected stories from these people, many of whom exist only as a memory in my mind, and a sentiment in my poetry.'

Kerrang : What's the best way you've heard you died? Davey: A heroin overdose, here in London. That was the most real one because that made it all the way back to the United States and caused our booking agent there to call our booking agent here to make sure I was okay. They often kill me of cancer, which I really don't like. Then there was the one that Claudio from Coheed and Cambria tackled me and killed me. Adam: What were you doing!? Davey: Playing football I guess. And I died, which sucks.

But yet that holden this tale a folly, As of a fox, or of a cock and hen, Taketh the morality, good men. For Saint Paul saith that all that written is, To our doctrine it is y-writ, ywis; Taketh the fruit, and let the chaff be still.

What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

[My forthcoming book features] Noelle's experience as a loveable, yet very unconventional looking dog, who must find her way through life in her new adopted home, feeling different and confronting a bevy of clustered animal cliques whose ultimate reluctance to include Noelle in their world is soon offset by Noelle's true, albeit hidden, beauty. [I hope it has] special resonance with the immigrant communities in the United States (primarily of Hispanic heritage) who may, like Noelle, feel they culturally do not, and will not, fit in with a culture so foreign from their own.

You know the man who told me about it on the bus, as it went up the hill out of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head, and he said (and this is exactly what he said) 'Boy that sure must've been something. Just imagine thirty thousand pounds of bananas. Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of mashed bananas. Of bananas. Just bananas. Thirty thousand pounds. of Bananas-not no driver now. Just bananas!'

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this ... Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.

I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding 'What is today's message?' And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to 'thought for the day.'

(Imitating an old woman) Well when i was a child there was a carnival and we used to play this game called put the apple in the bucket, i was very good at this game, you brought your own apple and you gave the man a penny to put the apple in his bucket, and when the bucket was full he got in a van and fucked off.

'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry (115.36)

As a science fiction fan, I have long been very familiar with the various themes in the field. The superman theme has been one of them ever since Samson and Hercules. I just sat down and wrote a story of that type - only in this first story, the Superman was a villain. A couple of months after I published this story, it occurred to me that a Superman as a hero rather than as a villain might make a great comic strip character in the vein of Tarzan, only more super and sensational than that great character. Joe and I drew it up as a comic book.

Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, 'between dog and wolf,' when the mind is disposed to marvels.

Stan Lee: Oh yeah. Mick Jagger and I had a running tally going. Last I checked I was way ahead.

And then they knew the perilous Rock, And blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves.

Showed me pictures in the gallery Showed me novels on the shelf Put my hands across the table Gave me knowledge of myself. Showed me visions, showed me nightmares Gave me dreams that never end Showed me light out of the tunnel When there was darkness all around instead.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethos ... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.

Someone told me I shot the tambourine man.

All the causes or purposes of all our acts are just stories we tell ourselves, stories we believe or disbelieve, changing all the time. But still we live, still we act, and all those acts have some kind of cause. The patterns all fit together into a web that connects everyone who's ever lived with everyone else. And every new person changes the web, adds to it, changes the connections, makes it all different. That's what I find with this program, how you believe you fit into the web Not how I really fit? How can I know? How can I measure it? I discover the stories that you believe most secretly, the stories that control your acts. But the very telling of the story changes the way you believe. Moves some things into the open, changes who you are. I undo my work by doing it

Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

MRR: Davey, tell the story about the time you guys played with SNFLL. Davey: Well, we have a couple of stories about that... When we played with SNFU, Geoff and I and our friend Smiff... Mark was there too, Adam had already left, for reasons unmentionable. We were standing at the table selling stuff, and there was this big girl... She was really tall, about 100 feet tall and...She wasn't fat or anyting- she was just BIG. She had this big smile and bright red lipstick and a short blond flat-top - a bleach-ed blond haircut like the girl in Rocky IV, or whatever. Mark: Like Susan Powter. Davey: Yeah, like her! 'Stop the Insanity!' So, she kept coming up to the SNFU table and checking out stuff and saying, 'Anything free?' and she'd smile. We'd say, 'No' and she'd make this grimace, pout, roll her eyes and walk away. She kept coming up and doing that and at one point, I was drinking Jolt and I had let somebody else drink out of it. There was lipstick on it when she gave it back to me. I said to Dave (SNFU's manager) after I drank from it, 'That's the closest thing I've come to a kiss in a long time.' And, so, he says, 'Aw, Davey, you just got to exert yourself.' So the big girl comes back and takes these two SNFU stickers off the table and tapes them to her breasts, which were kind of large. Dave says, 'Don't make me go there, 'cause I will.' She says, 'Well what if i run?' and Dave says, 'Well, me and Davey will have to catch you and tear them off. Won't that be fun?' I was just sitting there, so Dave says, 'I'll tell you what. If you give my friend Davey here a little kiss I'll let you have those two stickers for free.' She says, 'Okay,' and then he asked, 'How about you, Dave?', 'Uh, okay.' - I thought I was just gonna get a little smooch... Geoff: So Davey puckers up and the girl takes her hand, puts it behind Davey's head, and this 80 foot tongue shoots out of her mouth and goes down Davey's throat! Davey: I was shocked, I was crying, I couldn't breathe. Ohhh- it was horrible. Geoff: My eyes popped out of my head about three feet. Davey: It was traumatizing. Mark: And later on when she saw you what did she say? Oh, 'I'll see YOU later.' Davey: I'm a fucking idiot.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?

Oh, are you from Wales? Do you know a fella named Jonah? He used to live in whales for a while.

An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you Ef you don't watch out.

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal.

Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands.

I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that's OK - the bat had to get Ozzy shots