Story Telling Quotes

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.

~ Vera Nazarian

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.

~ Vera Nazarian

Narrative understanding is a large part of the ability to connect with, understand, and have compassion for all of us engaged in learning more about being human.

~ Leah C. Fowler

… real life hardly ever unfolds the way we’d like it to, not like in a story.

~ Lily Graham

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

~ Umberto Eco

Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.

~ April Genevieve Tucholke

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

~ Vera Nazarian

Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If the past is no longer presentis it fiction?

~ Natasha Tsakos

Because the new the stories we tell, the art we make, the rockets we build, will influence the future that shapes our present.

~ Natasha Tsakos

School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

It’s no longer history in the making. It’s our story we are making.

~ Natasha Tsakos

Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs.

~ Gyula Illyés

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.

~ Alice Munro

The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The first story to read is the Biblical stories.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

~ Jeanette Winterson

My wishes before I die, to fulfill my mission on earth; The writing of my life stories to inspired present and future generations.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Theatre is pure teleportation by means of suspension. It’s a voyage into the archives of the human imagination. A passport to all what ifs.

~ Natasha Tsakos

A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.

~ Jules Cashford

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.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

While Leo fussed over his helm controls, Hazel and Frank relayed the story of the fish-centaurs and their training camp.'Incredible,' Jason said. 'These are really good brownies.''That's your only comment?' Piper demanded.He looked surprised. 'What? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these brownies--''I know,' Frank said, his mouth full. 'Try them with Ester's peach preserves.''That,' Hazel said, 'is incredibly disgusting.''Pass me the jar, man,' Jason said.Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys.

~ Rick Riordan

These tales, without exception, express the truth that justice triumphs in the end. They all contain the idea that it is worth while to fight for the truth, in any situation.In this fight man is assisted by more powerful beings than ordinary mortals. And the triumph of justice is the only sense and consolation in this world. Indeed, the world itself started out with this hope. The human race received it long, long ago as a cradle-song.

~ Gyula Illyés

For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.

~ Rebecca Skloot

Every story needs to be worth telling.

~ Vera Nazarian

Any story worth telling has been embellished a little bit, Skyco, but the best stories are born from an honest seed that simply grows a little in the retelling of it.

~ Jennifer Frick-Ruppert

Some people believe in telling stories. Some believe in doing things about which stories will be told in times to come.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.

~ Sherman Alexie

We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.

~ Mani S. Sivasubramanian

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher..

~ Patti Davis

The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way.

~ Alister E. Mcgrath

My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother's body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.

~ Anita Amirrezvani

The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet, ...truth and courage prevail and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.

~ Gyula Illyés

Buying & selling is not a process, but a story, the base of this story is “need”. Need arising out of necessity or a feeling to own / experience that product / service. The customer narrates the base (need) of the story, but how well the story develops is left to the storytelling (sales pitch) skills of salesperson, sometimes the storytelling leaves such an impression that the customer has no choice but to be a part of that story.

~ Shahenshah Hafeez Khan

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

~ Holly Lisle