Walter Dean Myers Quotes

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.

It's important for us to tell our stories.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?

I love helping someone else tell their story, but I like being the storyteller sometimes.

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

You can use your story, or your story can use you.

I tell a story, and therefore I exist.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.