#tories

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. ↗

— Scott Fitzgerald

#fitzgerald #jazz-age-stories #age

The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!' Those were the days. (introduction to "The Weird Woman") ↗

— Hugh Lamb

#ghost-story #horror #victorian #victorian-age #victorian-era

We learned a verse of this and that and we were having fun with the songs. Tommy would make up stories to go along with them and I would yell at him, 'Hey, stupid, that's not right,' and he was like a silly kid trying to impress. ↗

— Dick Smothers

#fun #go #having #having fun #hey

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#architecture

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#stories #truth #art

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

#stories #art

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories! ↗

— A.B. Guthrie

#childhood-memory #childhood-stories #dickens #interview-transcription #kipling

It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli. ↗

— Melville Davisson Post

#storytelling #art

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human. ↗

— Camron Wright

#literature #stories #art

I've always thought my poems told stories. ↗

— Douglas Dunn

#i #poems #stories #thought #told