Storytelling Quotes

They say Night is all black in the faceAll that glitters only adds to the graceNo attempt to success ever succeedsWithout one slogging through the blackened days- Poem The Beauty of Night

~ Ankaj

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.

~ Isabella Koldras

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

~ Gerald Hausman

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

~ Robert Mckee

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

~ Patrice Nganang

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.

~ Marie Rutkoski

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

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

~ Erwin Raphael Mcmanus

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

~ Wes Jackson

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

~ Tahir Shah

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

~ George F. Will

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

~ David Halberstam

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

~ C.s. Lewis

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

~ Ryan Lilly

If we are going to live with our deepest differences then we must learn about one another.

~ Deborah J. Levine

Hip-hop is storytelling.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.

~ Charles Ray

Facts & figures go to the brain. And, the brain tends to forget . Stories go straight to the heart. They make us feel. And, the heart remembers.

~ Dawn Gluskin

[T]hose most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard.

~ Aminatta Forna

Stories weren't just make believe, all Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose. I saw a circle: first life, then death. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Blue sky and storms and quilts of cold clouds occupy the same space but at different times. Memories and stories help you rebuild. Things most precious to you may be gone, lost to the wicked wind, but you remember what had been, and you move on.

~ Rachael Hanel

If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.

~ Marina Warner

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do.

~ Dan Harmon

I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.

~ Federico Fellini

We hold these stories and mad idea and events in our head and they run around and around telling us we are different, separate, broken. Then one day the mad idea escapes the asylum. Most times it’s unplanned. It just tumbles out on the lap of the man sitting next to us on the bus, or it slips sideways into a conversation on line at the Trader Joe’s or it falls out at the kitchen table when your neighbor comes to pick up her cat. And there is a terrifying moment when it first hits the light of day, where we think, “holy mother of God! What have I done? How could I have been to casual with my crazy ways?”But the man on the bus just smiles and nods his head, and the casher takes a moment to look us in the eye and the neighbor sits for a cup of tea and together we move into some new agreements that we are all in fact crazy and it’s so much nicer to be out of the closet with it all.

~ Maureen Muldoon

In these story telling moments we equip our children, with crucial solution tools for life. To deprive them of these necessary teachable moments is like denying a carpenter the tools of his trade.

~ Drexel Deal

Story telling or teachable moments, provides us with a vast reference base of real life antidotes for possible future problems. They not only entertain and give us a resource of proven solutions, but they also help shape and mold our character. Therefore, when we don’t take our time to communicate with our kids, then we rob them of critical life lessons that we and our forefathers learn the hard way - lessons that they would needlessly have to learn through trial and error themselves.

~ Drexel Deal

If you are able to talk about your life and the joys and sorrows you have experienced, if you know your story, you are much more likely to be a skillful parent.

~ Desmond Tutu

A storyteller makes up things to help other people, a liar makes up things to help himself.

~ Daniel Wallace

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?

~ Charles Yu

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.

~ Betty Smith

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

~ Arzum Uzun

This story in my head is too hot to touch. I grabbed it anyway.

~ Adele Griffin

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

~ Diane Setterfield

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

~ William Zinsser

Storytelling? God started that. Discovery. Lust. Murder. Revenge. Power. Sin. Redemption. Forgiveness. Miracles. We simply retell the stories in the language of our generation.

~ Dennis R. Miller

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

~ China Miéville