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Storytelling Quotes
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
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"The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told."
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"Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many."
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"Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh."
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"Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story."
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"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."
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"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving."
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"Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie."
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"I don't think there is another person in America that wants to tell this story as much as I do."
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"Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size."
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"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."
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"If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong."
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"If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story."
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"We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write."
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"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good."
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"So what's your story? Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. "My story?"Yeah. Everybody has at least one."
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"A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart."
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"Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!"
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"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.You must remember this."
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"You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it."
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"Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being."
"Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it."
"The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination."
"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid, a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."
"That was what her parents did not understand-and had never understood-about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories."
"Postmen have a legendary aura. A ring at the doorbell may inflame a sense of expectation, suspense, secrecy, hazard or even intrigue. Ringing twice may imply a warning that trouble is on the way or an appeal to make the coast clear. Not all mailmen, though, will ring twice and await an eye-catching Lana Turner, whom they can whisper: "With my brains and your looks, we could go places. ['The postman always rings twice']"
"The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another."
"I just completed The Tenth Circle. It is an excellent mystery story surrounding a family with modern day issues."
"The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction."
"Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life's legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack."
"Pilon complained, "It is not a good story. There are too many meanings and too many lessons in it. Some of those lessons are opposite. There is not a story to take into your head. It proves nothing.""I like it" said Pablo. "I like it because it hasn't any meaning you can see, and still it does seem to mean something, I can't tell what."
"But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you."
"There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that."
"I can't sew, but I can spin one helluva yarn."
"I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true."
"Wit smiled. "All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names."
"If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."
"And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
"Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables."
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."
"Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone's story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world."
"So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic."
"You begin with other people's stories and end up with your own."
"Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."
"I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller."
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
"Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind."
"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule-a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."
"Let your story breathe and be what it really is."
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