66 Quotes About Story-telling

In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.

There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you.

Lascaux was in my time-stream, my ancestry, and Lascaux was the joy and the transport of stories. That's what lasts. It has lasted thirty thousand years.

Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one’s really gotten one’s imaginative passport stamped.

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten?

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first.People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

I feel like I didn't earn these stories, I feel like they just happened to me.

The tale is, in large part, our capital. I was nourished on tales...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.

For as long as she can remember, telling stories has been her momma's gift to those around her, fables filled with rich, detailed accounts of gods and monsters, of love and curses. She can weave a tale from Spanish moss and moonlight that will make a young girl's heart resonate with yearning or weep with anguish. Her coastal Georgia roots add a dark sweetness to all her narratives, one that stains her stories with sorrow like a drop of molasses dissolving in warm butter.