Storytelling Quotes - Page 14

In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.

Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.

Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.

Her words dance on the page.

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.

Sharing our story is one way we create intimacy. And like a good novel, it’s more engaging – and lasting – when we allow it to gradually unfold.

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us...as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind.

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.

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

A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.

Breathe in the beauty all around you.

Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.

First rate magician perform first rate magic effects, second rate magician performs third rate magic effects.

If you don’t think screenwriting is a work of art, good luck in your life without a soul.

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

Life is a rich literature. We are only writing the history of our time.

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

The Dreamer awakesThe shadow goes byThe tale I have told you,That tale is a lie.But listen to me,Bright maiden, proud youthThe tale is a lie;What it tells is the truth.

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday's and transported them to palaces in India, canals in Holland, pioneer stockades during the Indian wars, cattle ranches in the West, mountains in Switzerland, pagodas in China, igloos in Alaska, jungles in Africa, castles in England, slums in London, gardens in Japan, or most important of all, into happy homes where there were mothers and fathers and no Mrs. Mondays or Marybelles.

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.

...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.

Create from the heart.

All right. Then I'll begin... It's the tale of a man who drank the demon's liquor and gained immortality. That miserable man's lonely, lonely yarn. The stage is Prohibition-era New York. It's the story of the peculiar destiny surrounding the death sudden appearance of the liquor of immortality and of the spiral of people who found themselves drawn into it...

LOVE is measured in GAUGE TWENTY- specifically, love pressure in the surrounding area. If it drops below four percent, though, you may have trouble-the VW might get sad, slow down, or even stop altogether. If this occurs, you have to immediately find/write a story that somehow convinces him that there is more love, caring or compassion in the area than he thinks there is. I can’t tell you how many times this has been a problem for us- how many trips were interrupted because I had to head into the nearest populated town to see if we could find examples of kindness.

Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

Listen to what speaks to your heart.