127 quotes found
“If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply persona...”
“Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.”
“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”
“Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such f...”
“Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no wo...”
“People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. Therell be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-o...”
“Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.”
“Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”
“it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380”
“A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world. (Peter Nimble)”
“A story is never complete.”
“The only way to live several lives in one lifespan is to write stories.”
“We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstracti...”
“Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in allplaces, in all times. ”
“I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle i...”
“The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if ...”
“The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But...”
“Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You coul...”
“A tale spinner's goal is entertainment.”
“The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the tim...”
