Storytelling Quotes - Page 2

Reading opens up other pockets of the mind.

Storytelling has been around since men and women were first created. Stories give meaning to life and provide people with history, information, and entertainment.

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.

What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.

Too much truth destroys.

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.

Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.

Fly with a kind heart, a light spirit, and a resilient soul.

As long as we share our stories, as long as our stories reveal our strengths and vulnerabilities to each other, we reinvigorte our understanding and tolerance for the little quirks of personality that in other circumstances would drive us apart. When we live in a family, a community, a country where we know each other's true stories, we remember our capacity to lean in and love each other into wholeness. I have read the story of a tribe in southern Africa called the Babemba in which a person doing something wrong, something that destroys this delicate social net, brings all work in the village to a halt. The people gather around the "offender," and one by one they begin to recite everything he has done right in his life: every good deed, thoughtful behavior, act of social responsibility. These things have to be true about the person, and spoken honestly, but the time-honored consequence of misbehavior is to appreciate that person back into the better part of himself. The person is given the chance to remember who he is and why he is important to the life of the vi

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

I love a good 2,000 year old storytelling fresco!

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.

Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature.

A writer’s uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader.

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

Anchor Your Stories in Redemptive Themes So We Are Moved to Live Up to Them: Rather than making yourself the victim or the hero in the stories you tell, describe a daunting time of loss, crisis, or criticism or where you made a mistake or acted badly, yet you were eventually able to learn from it. Such stories show vulnerability and a desire to grow and live fully rather than in fear. Then that facet of you can be the place where others can positively and productively connect with you, hard-earned strengths firmly attached together. You can support each other in reinforcing redemptive characterizations and action.

Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.

That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380

Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

Of course I believe in magic. I believe in storytelling.

Chimerical words, the words were written,Some are wasted; some are still on the page,Tattered words, the words were written,Some are young, some are aged,Gloomy words, the words were written,Some are unspoken, some are told,Words were hurt, though they can heal,Words are breathless, though can feel,Words won hearts, words shattered hearts,Words lost battles, words won wars,Wars within, words had scars.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage...

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.

Storytelling is an essential part of our cultural and human identity...when we become afraid of stories outside the mainstream, I believe we have lost a valuable part of our cultural inheritance and growth.

You may have come to advocacy on your own, it may be part of your job or you may have been asked to “put a face” on a campaign by serving as its spokesperson. You may be acting as a lone crusader or as part of a larger advocacy effort. Either way, you share an objective with all other advocates: to have your story move audiences from apathy to empathy to action.

How you feel after reading something indicates not what you’ve read but where you are at.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

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.

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

I don't actually breakdance.

Nothing unleashes curiosity in an audience like good storytelling. Nothing inspires storytelling, in turn, like the results of curiosity.

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

They say Night is all black in the faceAll that glitters only adds to the graceNo attempt to success ever succeedsWithout one slogging through the blackened days"- Poem "The Beauty of Night

Jesus and institutional religion are on a collision course, and those who go with Jesus will find more adventure, freedom, and religion-bursting grace than they can stand, all the things that make traveling worth the effort. But they will also find clash and conflict. The path of Jesus is not well tolerated by the establishment.

If you are able to talk about your life and the joys and sorrows you have experienced, if you know your story, you are much more likely to be a skillful parent.

Lead with your heart. The rest will follow.

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.

Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty.

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.

When a story gets wedged in your head and refuses to go away, when it keeps coming back, again and again, despite your seeming inability to tell it, know this..the story has chosen you and You are ready, so tell it or it’ll haunt you to the end of your days. Characters too! They will find you, drop anchor and before you know, they will speak through you, shaping their own narrative, their own unique destiny. Let go and allow them. You have no option but to be a channel for them. This joy of surrender can only be felt… never truly explained.

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.

Everyone will say I'm insane, but I don't care, Rose. Is it insane to marry the girl I love? A girl with golden brown hair, with gifts of beauty and goodness and storytelling?

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

Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.