Storytelling Quotes

I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid 'us vs. them.

~ Aspen Baker

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.

~ Joss Whedon

All through the winter months, Rose kept up the practice of sitting by the fire with Peter and a book telling him stories. The doctor stopped to listen one afternoon out of curiosity, and heard her say, “…then the Mermaid said to the Pirate, ‘I would rather perish with the boy than go with you.’ And the Pirate said, ‘So be it,’ and sealed them both up inside the treasure chest. Then the pirate’s crew got together to lift the chest up, and with a nod from their captain, they cast the chest overboard into the sea. The chest was so heavy, it sank in the water in spite of the air inside, and in seconds it was gone from view, disappearing into the deep blue depths. If the boy and the mermaid were unable to free themselves, they would surely perish.” Peter’s eyes were wide with interest. “But- I can’t tell you what happened- you’ll have to find out next time.” She stopped and closed the book. Peter shook his head and put his hand on the book. She laughed and said, “You want to hear more now, do you?

~ Christopher Daniel Mechling

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.

~ Robert E. Barron

Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.

~ Nadia Hashimi

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.

~ Donald Miller

These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling of the old stories...We are grounded in its power. It is our connection to each other and to the larger universe.

~ Robert William Case

Great stories build relationships and make people care. Those two things are necessary to change anything.

~ Shane Snow

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

~ Cynthia Ogren

Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday's and transported them to palaces in India, canals in Holland, pioneer stockades during the Indian wars, cattle ranches in the West, mountains in Switzerland, pagodas in China, igloos in Alaska, jungles in Africa, castles in England, slums in London, gardens in Japan, or most important of all, into happy homes where there were mothers and fathers and no Mrs. Mondays or Marybelles.

~ Betty Macdonald

I Write books for the little girl in the adult woman who some man told she was not good enough. Let us dismantle the notion that a woman cannot be free with her sexuality or that she needs a man to make her complete. This one is for the little girls with hearts on their sleeves.

~ Crystal Evans

Zac dangled his legs off the edge of the building, hanging onto every word I said as though I were some old time bard telling an epic war tale. I tried to be as detailed as possible, and I knew that I was doing a good job when he'd lean back and shut his eyes. He'd breathe slowly and watch the pictures that I painted for him with my words. He'd smile, not a cunning toothy one, but a sincere smile that comes only from being truly happy. I'd sit across from him and just watch his reactions. We could be up there for hours. I would see the sunset across his face and be as captivated with his skin's changing colours as he was with my everyday stories. That's when I learned to dislike winters.

~ Ashley Newell

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and laughter 'til they bloom, 'til you yourself burst into bloom.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Rough Beast snorted. “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.”Caperton studied him. “Somebody at my job just said that.”“It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing--public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.”“But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?” Caperton said. “All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?”The Rough Beast shrugged. “Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.

~ Sam Lipsyte

But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

~ George Eliot

People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

~ Jonah Berger

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.

~ Michael Montoure

It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle. I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life's complexity more comprehensible. It's a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium.

~ Gavin Extence

Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.

~ Lloyd Jones

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

~ Aristotle

The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.

~ Steve House

Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element

~ Bascomb James

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

~ Wendell Berry

Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything that we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partially responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens, or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone—though not necessarily to the same person—and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping might scrutinize, set aside, and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once, although...it must be told when the time is right, or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognize that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another.

~ Javier Marías

Too much truth destroys.

~ Sara Stark

Even though this princess loved the oak and the castle and her mother, the queen, she tired of the beautiful swamp, of her surroundings. You see, as she grew she came to realize that if she looked too closely, she could recognize evil things in the swamp as well as all the extraordinary things she loved. There were hurtful, malicious things, things that grew quickly, quick enough to ensnare her and smother her if she wasn't careful, maybe even quick enough to steal her life away.

~ Sara Stark

Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.

~ Shannon Wiersbitzky

The folly and the glory of the world... the wild, the wise and the wicked... the hero, the madman, the wanderer and the fool... the earth, the seas, the wild heavens... are all part of an endless, unfolding tapestry, woven by time and hemmed by memory.

~ Brian Holguin

Wish not for treasure you can hold, No gleaming jewels, bright and cold, For finer still than pearl or gold, The treasure of a tale well told...

~ Brian Holguin

Her favorite stepping-aside technique was to lay out a dizzying mountain of complex steps and then pronounce the conclusion self-evident. Excuse me? Things that are self-evident don't need you or the presentation anyway. Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.

~ Charlotte Beers

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

~ Neil Gaiman

'So what happens next?' 'Everybody dies, and the people who don't get married.' 'Like any other story, then.'

~ Sarah Monette

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

~ Pat Conroy

As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.

~ Robert Quillen

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

~ Dorothy Allison

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

~ Sara Sheridan

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

~ Christina Baldwin