Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Oh, the humor! It's hysterical. And it's smart and goofy at the same time, kind of like a Neil Simon play or a Mel Brooks movie. I read it over and over again, and it changed me in the way of storytelling, seeing things differently.
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I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
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Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.
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And the serial continues: Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,...
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Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making. The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering is the enemy of good places and of public history.
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We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
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Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
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The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
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While history offers us many stories worth telling, some belong to other people, who paid for them with their lives. We may retell their stories badly or well. We may embellish them or get them wrong. But we should not do so blithely, just as we should not scrawl slogans on other people's houses, or stride into their living rooms to replace the furniture. Thinking that we can is not novel history. It's novel morality, unworthy of artists and storytellers.
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'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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Through his mastery of storytelling techniques, he has managed to separate his character, in the public mind, from his actions as president. ... He has, in short, mesmerized us with that steady gaze.
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Under the Earth I go, On the oak leaf I stand. I ride on the filly That was never foaled, And I carry the dead in my hand.
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.
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One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
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Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Life is too short for a long story.
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I will open my mouth in a parable I will utter dark sayings of old. Things that we have heard and known, that our fathers told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell it to the coming generations.
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If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life.
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