Oriana Fallaci Quotes

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

I think that when we look at something that's well acted and a story that's well told, it allows us to be a mirror of who we are as human beings and as a culture, and offers a glimpse of where we're headed.

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they'd never be able to view in their own lives.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.