Quotes by Storytellers

An oak and a reed were arguing about their strength. When a strong wind came up the reed avoided being uprooted by bending and leaning with the gusts of wind. But the oak stood firm and was torn up by the roots.
Aesop
United you will be more than a match for your enemies. But if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you.
Aesop
Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.
Joseph Bruchac
Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call "history." Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality that comes from the bedrock of lore from which they emerged.
Gerald Hausman
Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
Aesop
After the rain cometh the fair weather.
Aesop
Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.
Carmen Agra Deedy
A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.
Aesop
You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are.
Matthew Dicks
I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all is well.
S. Bear Bergman
As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).
S. Bear Bergman
An Ass put on a Lion's skin and wentAbout the foreset with much merriment,Scaring the foolish beasts by brooks and rocks,Till at last he tried to scare the Fox. But Reynard, hearing from beneath the mane That Raucous voice so petulant and vain,Remarked. O' Ass, I too would run away,But that I know your old familiar bray'.That's just the way with asses, just the way.
Aesop
You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water.
S. Bear Bergman
We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.
Joseph Bruchac
He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.
Aesop
if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. 
Gerald Hausman
So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.
S. Bear Bergman
The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
Aesop
Little by little does the trick.
Aesop
There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. 
Gerald Hausman
Plodding wins the race.
Aesop
Be content with your lot one cannot be first in everything.
Aesop
He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.
Aesop
I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also—I am so gratified to report—they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well.
S. Bear Bergman
The value is in the worth, not in the number.
Aesop
Who're them?" says he to the curate."Them are the fallen angels," says the c
Eddie Lenihan
Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.
Nancy Mellon
Much wants more and loses all.
Aesop
It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
Aesop
Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society’s margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility—look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter.
S. Bear Bergman
Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.
Utah Phillips
Do not waste your pity on a scamp.
Aesop
...convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain.
Aesop
And, in the end, I knew there was nothing better in life than keeping the head and the heart up—and when you cannot see the shoreline, always putting one hand, one word, in front of the other.
Gerald Hausman
Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.
Joseph Bruchac
I thought these grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.
Aesop
Genuine bravery occurs when you least expect it, and when, in fact, you're quite oblivious of it.  Sometimes heroism happens when you press on; other times when you let go.  Once in a while, it happens when you do a little dance all your own.
Gerald Hausman
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Aesop
I don't mind having to die now, for I see that he is the cause of my death is about to share the same fate.
Aesop
Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety.
Aesop
Better poverty without a care than wealth with its many obligations.
Aesop
All men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.
Aesop
It is vain to expect our prayers to be heard if we do not strive as well as pray.
Aesop
Once a wolf, always a wolf.
Aesop
There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.
S. Bear Bergman
No one believes a liar even when he tells the truth
Aesop
We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.
Ethel Barrett
There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 
Gerald Hausman
There'll be no more music, Father. But there'll be this!" He stepped into the dark, picked up the knife, and held it under their noses. "Go home. Tell your people what you saw and heard here tonight. And tell 'em that anyone we catch on these roads after dark anymore... this is what they'll get. Now that I know we're never to see the face o' God, we have nothing to lose. So, make sure you have your message right, Father, 'cause there'll be no other warning.
Eddie Lenihan
The Sun is bad enough even while he is single, drying up our marshes with his heat as he does. But what will become of us if he marries and and begets other suns?
Aesop
It is in vain to expect our prayers to be heard.
Aesop
Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin' shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.
Joseph Bruchac
The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You'reborn with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something youassume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree towhich you resist is the degree to which you are free...
Utah Phillips
My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
S. Bear Bergman
The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.
Joseph Bruchac
Kindness affects more than severity.
Aesop
Maybe they hurt so much that the only way they can say it, is to say nothing
Matthew Dicks
Betray a friend, and you'll often find you have ruined yourself.
Aesop
Perhaps, as with advancing age, the physical life becomes less important and yet, paradoxically, more precious, this green revolution against the temporary death of winter is a reminder that the earth, like our own lives, is a gift.
Willem Lange
And there, on that road, that very minute, he started to play - the most lonesome music that them priests ever in their lives heard. It brought water out o' their teeth, so it did.
Eddie Lenihan