#stories

Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he, Dad?' 'Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that's saying a lot.' Frodo: [continue walking] You've left out one of the chief characters - Samwise the Brave. I want to hear more about Sam. [stops and turns to Sam] Frodo: Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam. Sam: Now Mr. Frodo, you shouldn't make fun; I was being serious. Frodo: So was I. [they continue to walk] Sam: Samwise the Brave... ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#lord-of-the-rings #sam-gamgee #samwise #samwise-the-brave #stories

أنا أموت دون أن انتبه ↗

— Isabel Allende

#stories #death

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. ↗

— Kate Summerscale

#crime #detective-stories #detectives #investigations #mysteries

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. ↗

— Francis M. Nevins

#cornell-woolrich #doomed #hunted #hysteria #nightmarish

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#stories #death

Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside. ↗

— Tahir Shah

#storytelling #truth #dreams

And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams. And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep. ↗

— Hélène Cixous

#stories #words #dreams

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#poe #short-stories #the-cask-of-amontillado #equality

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. ↗

— Anthony de Mello

#experience

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat #early-stories-and-other-writings #experience-mistakes-wisdom #jack-kerouac #man