Storytelling Quotes

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

~ George R.r. Martin

God is an author, and we are His best story.

~ Cier Galla

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.

~ Walter Isaacson

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

~ Philip Zaleski

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

~ Robert Kurson

Always have class but always kick ass.

~ A.d. Posey

Write your sacred story.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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.

~ Randy Murray

May 4, 2006Blog Entry #1There once was a girl who took everything for granted.
 She had friends.
She had good friends—friends who saw her geeky exterior but loved her anyway, friends who had known her since before she knew herself. But she wanted more.
She had people who loved her. She had a huge house on a hill. A bedroom as big as a studio apartment. But she still wasn't satisfied. She moved to the ends of the earth … Long Island, New York. She thought it would be exciting. And for a little while it was. But she soon found that life in the “city” wasn’t everything she hoped for. Before long, all the shops and landmarks were meaningless, and she realized that all the parties in the world meant nothing—especially if she didn't have the people to share them with. She decided to make a distress call. She lined up coconuts. H–E–L–PShe spent one and a half years on her “deserted island.” Then, a moving truck finally answered her call. But little did she know that she was returning to her home as a different person. She was returning with lessons of contentment that would stick with her forever. Lessons of gratitude, integrity, faith, and love. Exposure to things and ideas she would have never seen in Snellville, Georgia. How she could be and how her life could be… She drove back down only to find that she wasn't the only one who had changed.

~ Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

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...

~ Joseph Conrad

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

~ Vera Nazarian

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.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Ha-ha!' the fox laughed. '*Just* stories, you say, as if stories mean nothing? Stories are the stuff that sticks the world together. Stories are the mud from which we're all made. The power to imagine stories is the power to remake the world as we dream it.

~ C. Alexander London

Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams which have been imagined--'dreamed up', to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something 'dream-like', which may be why dream descriptions within stories seen curiously meaningless. To avoid glazing over, best then to turn the page quickly.

~ Murray Bail

With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky.

~ Clara Chow

And that’s when I knew she was not doing this on purpose; that her stories came from a place deep within her, beyond thought and formal language.

~ Clara Chow

Shamans enter the dream world of sub-consciousness to wrestle with demons and rally angels. They return with tales of their encounters which become the myths and legends of their communities.

~ Jeff Rasley

Comfort yields complacency. Break free.

~ A.d. Posey

Everyone is a raconteur without realizing it. We speak to our friends, we speak to our doctors and therapists about the nothing-meaning nonsense that goes on in our lives, but the difference in telling a story and complaining about the ills of one’s life is in the delivery. We can talk about how someone slighted you at work, or we can talk about how that person looked when they promptly fell down the stairs a moment after disdaining you. There, you see, is the difference: people will often notice the main but not the nuance; they will notice the face of the person yelling at them and the pitch of their shouts, but will not notice the comfort that the ululations of agony and twisted limbs lying on the bottom stile can promise.

~ Michelle Franklin

Maybe your past isn't perfect. Maybe it was brutal. Maybe you were brutal. Maybe you've got more scars than you thought one skin could hold. You can't linger on those thoughts. You will drown in them. After all, it's only an interesting backstory if you can get past it.

~ Jessica Hagy

What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.

~ Charlotte Brontë

When a writer's heart is filled with the music of her soul, her words sing.

~ A.d. Posey

Intuition is truth.

~ A.d. Posey

Stories change the world.

~ A.d. Posey

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.

~ Walter Moers

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?

~ Melanie Dickerson

Find beauty in the madness.

~ A.d. Posey

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

~ A.d. Posey

We are artists. When we can’t find the beauty, we create it.

~ A.d. Posey

Breathe in the beauty all around you.

~ A.d. Posey

Time unfolds beauty, wonder, and mystery to reveal the auspicious tapestry of life.

~ A.d. Posey

With grace and beauty, feel.

~ A.d. Posey

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

~ A.d. Posey

Film gives us a second chance at a first impression.

~ A.d. Posey

Crying cleanses the soul.

~ A.d. Posey

Close your eyes. Hear the silent snow. Listen to your soul speak.

~ A.d. Posey

Give all of life’s oxygen to the fire that is your soul.

~ A.d. Posey

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

~ A.d. Posey

I have the heart of an artist and the soul of a writer.

~ A.d. Posey

Good food warms the heart and feeds the soul.

~ A.d. Posey