1,265 Quotes About Storytelling

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature.

In life your rewards come from the gifts you give to others.

The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught.

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.

Mama always did tell a good story, built a solid background, then deftly lead her engrossed listener through a series of doorways, enticing them in before delivering the coup de grâce.

And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap.

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.