I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

Flannery O’Connor
 

Storytelling is vital to human health. It gives us workable metaphors for our lives.

Clarence Major
 

The oldest story is the story of flight, the search for greener pastures.

Guy Vanderhaeghe.
 

Fiction writers are thoughtful interpreters of the world.

Annie Dillard
 

Stories are powerful. They are a journey and a joining. In a tale we meet new places, new people, new ideas. And they become our places, our people, our ideas.

Jane Yolen

A country may have great corporations, but if it has no literature it is a country that has no soul. It is a shopkeeper’s society. The new nationalists, it seems to me, are concerned only with who is minding the store.

Morley Callaghan
 

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing to do is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of the story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

Flannery O’Connor

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it…

Flannery O’Connor