Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Storytelling.
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
Stephen King
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...
Life is too short for a long story.
Mary Wortley Montagu
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.
Jim Trelease
While history offers us many stories worth telling, some belong to other people, who paid for them with their lives. We may retell their stories badly or well. We may embellish them or get them wrong. But we should not do so blithely, just as we should not scrawl slogans on other people's houses, or stride into their living rooms to replace the furniture. Thinking that we can is not novel history. It's novel morality, unworthy of artists and storytellers.
Carlin Romano, Accuracy: A Novel
Lives are not stories. A day, a month, a year, or a lifetime has no plot. Our experiences are only the raw stuff of stories. The beginnings of our lives are arbitrary; usually their endings come too soon or too late for any neat narrative conclusions.We turn our lives into stories, and, in doing so, we can stop them where we choose. Our stories do in a small way what memoirs and autobiographies do on a grander scale: they allow a self-fashioning that gives remembered lives a coherence that the day-to-day lives of actual experience lack. History, of course, also imposes coherence, but the historian works will less malleable stuff than memory. Memoirs are seamless; good histories disrupt.
Richard White, Remembering Ahana
If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life.
Anon., (Siberian Elder)
I will open my mouth in a parable I will utter dark sayings of old.Things that we have heard and known,that our fathers told us.We will not hide them from their children,but tell it to the coming generations.
Bible, Psalm 78:14
She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten.
Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
Mary Catherine Bateson
'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.
Philip Pullman
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
Salman Rushdie
You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.
Anthony De Mello, One Minute Wis
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making. The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering is the enemy of good places and of public history.
Robert R. Archibald, A Place to
The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.
Jeanette Winterson
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
