Quotessence
Home / Topics / Storytelling Quotes

Storytelling Quotes

Browse 1553 quotes about Storytelling.

Related topics

Storytelling Quotes

“If you read stories, you find the strength, faith and hope to survive everyday life.”

“Her favorite stepping-aside technique was to lay out a dizzying mountain of complex steps and then pronounce the conclusion self-evident. Excuse me? Things that are self-evident don't need you or the presentation anyway. Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.”

“We testify of what we have experienced and witnessed. May our testimony inspired others to share their story.”

“Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions (happy is boring, evil is interesting) about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it’s a rare commodity attained through dumb luck….It’s possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that does not paralyze the will or sap ambition….the number one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy. Bliss is a habit you can cultivate, in other words, not an accident.”

“It's not so much that history is written by the victors, as the old saying goes, but the powerful do often have the capacity to make themselves heard and to erase the voices of others.”

“On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now. My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them. As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.” —Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 297”

“As we can learn from every man or woman or child around us when, touched and moved, they tell of something they loved or hated this day, yesterday, or some other day long past. At a given moment, the fuse, after sputtering wetly, flares, and the fireworks begin. Oh, it's limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way. But I have heard farmers tell about their very first wheat crop on their first farm after moving from another state, and if it wasn't Robert Frost talking, it was his cousin, five times removed. I have heard locomotive engineers talk about America in the tones of Thomas Wolfe who rode our country with his style as they ride it in their steel. I have heard mothers tell of the long nights with their firstborn when they were afraid that they and the baby might die. And I have heard my grandmother speak of her first ball when she was seventeen. And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.”

“Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

“The reason why I am hopeful is because what we're now seeing is the formation of a new narrative struggle. When you're enslaved, you have to focus on freedom. When you're being terrorized and lynched, you have to focus on security. When you're disenfranchised and you don't have any opportunities for education and other businesses, you have to focus on civil rights. Now we're at a moment where we are in the beginnings of a narrative struggle. The reason why I'm hopeful is that earlier, even in my career, we didn't have thousands of committed journalists and professionals and storytellers and filmmakers and writers who could participate in this narrative structure. We have never been better situated to win the next phase of this struggle toward a just America than we are right now.”

“It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.”

“Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

“There's this word Libel that people love to pass around when filing lawsuits against someone who accurately described them in a publication. It does not scare me because I know that the story terrifies them enough to stick to the compromise that I called it fiction”