Storytelling Quotes

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

~ Salman Rushdie

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

~ Susan Reynolds

Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting.

~ Pawan Mishra

I've thought and thought, but there's no other way to give you the truth except to hide it in a story and let you find your own way inside. All stories contain a truth if you look hard enough - but it might not be a good truth.

~ Kirsty Logan

What we need now are new stories to share with each other, new tales to live into the world, which is to say, stories to make real by living our own versions of them.

~ Bill Plotkin

Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.

~ Okey Ndibe

I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

~ Johnny Rich

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

~ Yann Martel

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.

~ Meghan Daum

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

~ Aisha Mirza

I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.

~ Danielle Collobert

Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.

~ Mia Couto

But she always kept on until the end. She knew, as i knew, that you don't stop a story half done. You keep on going, through heartbreak and pain and fear, and times there is a happy ending, and times there isn't. Don't matter. You don't cut a flower half through and then wait and watch as it slowly shrivels to death. And you don't stop a story before you reach the end. - A Creature of Moonlight

~ Rebecca Hahn

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

~ Martin Shaw

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

Fictions are realities we don't think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about.

~ Sanhita Baruah

I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.

~ Ibraheem Hamdi

I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

~ Karen Hines

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

~ Sara Sheridan

Winter is the time for stories, staying fast by the glow of fire. And outside, in the darkness, the stars are brighter than you can possibly imagine.

~ Isabel Greenberg

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

ANYTHING IN THIS UNIVERSE CAN BE A STORY WORTH TELLING, AS LONG AS YOU KNOW HOW TO BEST TELL IT.

~ Film Crit Hulk!

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.

~ Amit Kalantri

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

~ Richard Kearney

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.

~ James Rozoff

...not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.

~ Jacqueline Carey

I must have been chosen because I know it all from beginning to end. I am certainly not the story itself. I am only the grass that tattles on the wind.

~ Alfredo Véa

I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

~ Chris Cleave

It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.

~ Melville Davisson Post

The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

~ Annette Simmons

No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.

~ Grant Morrison

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

~ Robert Mckee

If you want meaning for your brand or company, dare to embrace conflict

~ Antonio Nuñez Lopez

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.

~ Patrick Somerville

Laughter is easiest said in a story, some people just forget that their life is a story.

~ Andrew Carson