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Storytelling Quotes

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Storytelling Quotes

“With the oysters, I'm at the shore, swimming in the heat of the day. She serves us baby cream biscuits and smoked peach butter that taste exactly like those we'd eat around her mother's table during a Sunday dinner, only better, tweaked in a way that makes me want to taste it again and again. Buttermilk panna cotta with spot prawns and spring vegetables pulls me right into lazy picnics in Delilah's backyard, when we'd gorge on plump peas, sweet tomatoes, crisp cucumbers. The tender shrimp and tart buttermilk--- all of this is our childhood on a plate. I never wanted to look too closely at that time, but it's slapping me tight in the face. Oddly, it doesn't hurt. Not this version. It feels fragile and rare, like I should be protecting it, like I should be proud of where we come from and who we are. And then the menu changes on me. The servers bring out what Delilah says is butter-poached cod with potato galette and shellfish emulsion dotted with petals of mango and peach. It is the clean taste of the sea; it is buttery velvet along my tongue, bright bursts of juicy fruit. Underneath it all is a crisp, airy version of what is essentially a gourmet tater tot. The taste is erotic. Heat and lust wash over me in a wave that has my balls clenching and my cock stiffening. I can't figure out why. Then it hits me like a kick to the chest. This dish is us. Frantic kissing on the beach, eating juicy mangos at the market, peaches and tater tots. She's created us. A compilation of all she holds dear.”

“The stories we tell about who we are as a nation, and the values that define us, are not fixed. They change as facts change. They change as the balance of power in society changes. Which is why regular people, not just governments, need to be active participants in this process of retelling and reimagining our collective stories, symbols, and histories.”

“When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the 'why' behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress. Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.”

“We fiction writers have a responsibility when creating a character; he or she must sit beside us as we read the story. If she isn’t, we haven’t done our job. Therefore, writing Dr. T’s character forced a plunge into places I had no interest in going. A person like Adam Turner would not have come into this beautiful world looking for a kid to control, manipulate, or wreck. There had to be a reason- that created massive psychic wounds.”

“Storytelling in a broader sense—giving clarity, meaning and motivation—is something that is relevant to every department in every industry, at every level. It is mission critical.”

“As the number of oral cultures in the world has diminished, interest in them has grown, and one of the most intriguing questions is whether there might be such a thing as an ‘oral way of seeing’, a worldview common to oral peoples that might be different in some generalizable way from the worldview of people in cultures with writing.”

“When we speak with others about our experience in Christ, it sharpens our attentiveness to the voice and will of the Father. Sharing our stories helps us clarify the intentions of our hearts toward the fulfillment of his divine will. A small circle of friends also reminds us of the presence, power and protection of the Holy Spirit. Confiding in one another instills a sense of hope for the future as children who are dearly loved by their Father.”

“When we make stories, when we turn raw events into personal sagas, parables, tales, and anecdotes, we are often struggling to come to terms with one of the inescapably difficult and puzzling facts of existence. Storytelling is an attempt to deal with and at least partly contain the terrifyingly haphazard quality of life. Large parts of life, sometimes the mots crucial parts, depend on random happenings, contingency. A woman turns a corner, meets a strange man, two years later they marry, they have children together – and in twenty years, there are adults walking the earth who would not have existed if that woman had not turned that corner on that day. The human results of that apparently random event may go on for hundreds or even thousands of years, a single stray moment casting its shadow into an unimaginably long future. We can gaze on this fact with wonder; but we may also grow uneasy in contemplating it, because it emphasizes how little we control the course of our lives”

“Christian was not talking at all. He was reading aloud. "I explained to her that I had no parents. She inquired how long they had been dead; then how old I was, what was my name, whether I could read, write, and sew a little; then she touched my cheek gently with her forefinger, and saying 'She hoped I should be a good child,' dismissed me along with Miss Miller." He was reading Jane Eyre to her!”

“As I sat on the back of his bike, Anh Bao pointed out local sex workers he recognized as they walked out of a bar with their arms wrapped around Viet Kieu men. He had gotten to know these women when he parked his bike outside the bar around closing time to offer cheap rides home to the women who had been unable to secure a client for the evening. Over the course of nearly three hours spent cycling the city, I took everything in—making mental notes of things I would later enter into my research. Anh Bao was a storyteller; and as we stopped outside each place, I propped on his bike laughing as he made up dramatic scenarios about the kinds of love affairs that occurred in each segment of the sex industry.”

“When we recount our own tales we focus on the features that to us loom large and omit the ones that to us seem irrelevant. Studies show that it is likely that we do this early on, when we first give linguistic shape to our narrative, such that over time we don’t even see ourselves as exaggerating or minimizing.”

“Language is a tool that allows us to express our thoughts. We use mechanisms of language including oral storytelling and indicative writing to depict a storehouse of evocative images. Language links our mind’s tawny memory and blooming imagination to the world. Storytelling connects each of us to the consciousness of other people who inhabit this planet.”

“In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.”

“When the anthropologist asked the Kwakiutl for a map of their coast, they told him stories: "Here? Salmon gather. Here? Sea otter camps. Here seal sleep. Here we say body covered with mouths." How can a place have a name? A man, a woman may have a name, but they die. We are a story until we die. Then our names are very dangerous. A place is a story happening many times.”

“During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama's success--campaigns are about telling the American people a story--a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It's a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.”

“In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?”

“What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.”