Quotes about Stories

few things have more transformative power than people and stories.

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

Unlike most academics, Warren showed a gift for translating financial analysis into stories that ordinary folks could understand. In the intervening years, she had emerged as one of the financial industry's most effective critics, prompting Harry Reid to appoint her as chair of the congressional panel overseeing TARP.

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.

But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.

When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

If the Bible is called the Good Book, it's not because its people are. Blood flows as freely through the stories as the ink through the quills that penned them.

By giving us stories like Joseph's, God allows us to study his plans.