Storytelling Quotes

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

Victor Hugo

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Raymond Chandler

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

John Green

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

Jean de la Bruyere

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Ernest Hemingway

The first law of story-telling. Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

Mrs. Humphrey Ward

Under the Earth I go, On the oak leaf I stand.I ride on the fillyThat was never foaled,And I carry the dead in my hand.

Anon., traditional storyteller's

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Stephen Jay Gould

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Lord Chesterfield

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

Neil Gaiman

People are hungry for stories. It

Studs Terkel

I cannot tell how the truth may be;I say the tale as 'twas said to me.

Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the

One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow?

Matthew Fox

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Hannah Arendt

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

Isak Dinesen

Their story, yours and mine -- it

William Carlos Williams

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

Robert McKee

We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel-

John Steinbeck