Storytelling Quotes - Page 7

Storytelling is the very soul of humankind made plain for all to experience.

Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

Is this a kissing book?

Pour your heart onto the page.

Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadors of the past, who hid their messages in poems, songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose [ … ] It was by telling stories that I would save myself.

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit.""Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. "You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I'm making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?""When the earth's shadow falls across the Moon.""Very significant. I'm sure it's a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.""Kind of trite." I said.He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life--his, everyone's--I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.

Hip-hop is storytelling.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

Speak from the heart and feel your tension melt away.

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

That is the power of a good story. It can encourage you, it can make you laugh, it can bring you joy. It will make you think, it will tap innto your hidden emotions, and it can make you cry. The power of a story can also bring about healing, give you peace, and change your life!" (p.15)

Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking--only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

Write from the heart… always.

You bound him to you with your courage and your tales. You hold him to you now. You captured a wild creature when you had no place you could keep him.

By telling stories, Jesus isn’t somehow putting sugar in a spoon to make the medicine go down a bit easier. These stories are the medicine. These stories are an extension and explanation of Jesus’ revolutionary ministry. These stories show us that things are not as they appear. Our tidy, well-packaged ideas about spirituality, faith, and reality shatter when confronted by Christ and the God he represents.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.

When your heart is open, your eyes see the beauty that is all around you.

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.

The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house.

A writer is a dangerous friend. Everything you say, all of your life and experience, is fodder for our writing. We mean you no harm, but what you know and what you’ve done is unavoidably fascinating to us. Being friends with a writer is a bit like trying to keep a bear as a pet. They’re wonderful, friendly creatures, but they play rough and they don’t know their own strength or remember that they have claws. Choose the stories you tell to your writer friends carefully.

The process doesn’t end there. Stories are more than just images. As you continue in the tale, you get to know the characters, motivations and conflicts that make up the core of the story. This requires more parts of the brain. Some parts process emotion. Others infer the thoughts of others, letting us empathize with their experiences. Yet other parts package the experience into memories for future reflection

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.Fire Up Your Writing Brain

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation

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

To paint an image and to write a poem, is to reclaim the dignity and personal joy...it is an invitation for my creative contemplation of an opened mind...it is a storytelling venture on a blank page of paper and white canvases...it is reclaiming my life.

And she cries even more, for the way the universe keeps throwing her together with the players in her son's tragedy, like handfuls of dust.

George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

No one cares about the art of the lie at this point. They insist on impressing with the truth. See me! Look at me! Look at who I am! Look at who I want you to think I am!

Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.

Magician is the best storyteller in the world.

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .

I don't actually breakdance.

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told.

People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.

It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

Though a story may begin as a lie, perhaps it can be made true. Perhapsd their ultimate power is found in how they inspire us to action.

Only cowards leave words unspoken.

If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.

Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries. I believe print and web can work beautifully together.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

The Book CharmYour Story Will Never End As Long As Your Chapters Are Shared

A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.

Always have class but always kick ass.

The Queen died. The King died.”“The Queen died. And the King died of a broken heart.”The first line was fact. The second line was a story. It placed the facts in context, added emotion and made us connect to it by making it memorable.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

Did you know that writing stories down kills them?Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...

One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It’s the same thing: a child asks, “What’s going to happen next?” When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it’s not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don’t want to test that simple sense of being human. I don’t want to transform it.

The power of classical music turns my words into fire.