Quotes About Storytelling

But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that. MOYERS: So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the generations, isn't functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one?

Ona and Yagan people.

mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it.

this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died.

MOYERS: But that's not the Christian idea of creation

the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear;

No quiero aburrirlos demasiado con lo que me ocurrió personalmente

In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.

When you're telling a story, you're trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don't think the show is off the air. I don't think there's a show; I think that's what the world is like. … The story is our lives.

Sometimes you might make up a story and tell it to other people

An untrue story that is told for fun is called a fantasy.

Poet Warrior gave birth to two children And acquired more children along the way Through association, marriage, and love. There were more and more story bringers In her world. They became her fiercest teachers Of how there is no end to love And of how it plants itself Deeper than earth Or sky.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses—one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment.

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that's who forms our poetics.

Lo importante en nuestra sociedad no es lo que pasa, sino quién cuenta lo que pasa.

One of your first tasks, then, is to ask yourself: why do I care about this? The answer will make you feel entitled to tell your own story—to accept that it is not only worthy of being written down but fit material for literature—something you want to revise and craft until it is beautiful.

Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Her twenty-seven books have won many awards, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Judy lives in Key West and New

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else - the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well - we certainly write more easily.

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

Nevertheless, no fictions.

like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...