Storytelling Quotes

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.

~ Hassan Blasim

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

~ Alethea Kontis

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

~ Scott Mccloud

Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.

~ Enrique De Hériz

We are reaching levels of high experiential comfort and our standards will keep rising. We want to feel, we want to experience, we want to connect, we want intelligence, and we want to play; Ladies and Gentlemen: A new theatre is on its way.

~ Natasha Tsakos

You can’t undo the past, but you can remedy it by creating a better future.

~ A.d. Posey

Don’t let the poison of the past spoil a fruitful future.

~ A.d. Posey

Talent and work ethic are nothing without belief.

~ A.d. Posey

In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?

~ Michael Paterniti

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

~ Jules Verne

A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

~ C.s. Lewis

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

~ Ander Monson

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Her words dance on the page.

~ A.d. Posey

Only cowards leave words unspoken.

~ A.d. Posey

The power of classical music turns my words into fire.

~ A.d. Posey

Be careful what you say and do around a writer, your words and actions may become material.

~ A.d. Posey

I fight evil, and words are my weapons of choice.

~ A.d. Posey

Love writes without words.

~ A.d. Posey

The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

~ Betsy Cornwell

Tell your story to inspired other people to rise up and live their dreams.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I do believe that some humans have more amazing lives than others–above all, those who don’t sit down in a chair like mere spectators letting their lives happen in front of them, but they take risks as heroes do, experiencing, living, becoming the main character—but no matter what, we all have at least one story to tell.

~ Merce Cardus

Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Fight the darkness. Fight for the light.

~ A.d. Posey

Wherever you are, wherever you go, be sure to spread the light.

~ A.d. Posey

A day’s brightness is determined by the light in our hearts.

~ A.d. Posey

Don’t confuse the darkness that’s leaving with the light that’s coming in.

~ A.d. Posey

Be the light.

~ A.d. Posey

Sometimes you have to take a shot in the dark to discover the light.

~ A.d. Posey

Vulnerability lets in light.

~ A.d. Posey

Light your fire.

~ A.d. Posey

See your light.

~ A.d. Posey

Have the discipline to listen to and to trust your instincts.

~ A.d. Posey

We testify of what we have experienced and witnessed. May our testimony inspired others to share their story.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

~ Sharon Salzberg

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

~ Christopher Boucher