“Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her.”
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
“Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.”
“Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.”
“How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, Where are you going to get $200,000 per year? To which the man responded, That s your worry.”
“I choose to write because it s perfect for me. It s an escape, a place I can go to hide. It s a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It s a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It s a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It s control, when I feel so out of control. It s healing, when everything seems pretty messed up. And it s fun, when life is just flat-out boring.”
“When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that one of the best things in life is the knowledge that our story isn t over yet. Our story may have come to a close, but your story is still yet to be told. Make it a story worthy of you”
“In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.”
“The truth of the story lies in the details.”
“So, what is my story? I don t know. It s long and twisted and not quite finished yet.”
“Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there s no one left to tell those stories? To hear them? Who will ever know that I existed? What if we are the only ones left -- who will know our stories then? Who will remember those?”
“Here I am once again Holding my pen while it’s going all dry With no stories there to write Nor remarkable dates for me to scratch And it scares the hell out of me the way my soul became so numb That all my papers turn into blanks …”
“The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone s life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.”
“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. So thank you, all of you.”
“I have always thought that librarians are a little bit like doctors, travel agents and professors all rolled into one. We all know that a great story can lift spirits, take you anywhere in the world you want to go and in any time period to boot, and the lessons you learn from a good book can buoy your own convictions and even change your life. ”
“It could have happened lots of ways. But this is the way it happened. This is the path we took. This is our story.”
“She can paint a lovely picture, but this story has a twist. her paintbrush is a razor, and her canvas is her wrist.”