Quotes About Storytelling

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.

Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.

We need to have owned our stories before sharing them is experienced as a gift. A story is only ready to share when the presenter's healing and growth is not dependent on the audience's response to it.

But the idea that we're "wired for story" is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.

When unconscious storytelling becomes out default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships--we've got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, "In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.

We have to own our story and share it with someone who has earned the right to hear it, someone whom we can count on to respond with compassion.

The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.

Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it—it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes. I

Gottschal writes " Conspiracy is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind's compulsive need for meaningful experience

our worthiness, that core belief that we are enough, comes only when we live inside our story. We either own our stories (even the messy ones), or we stand outside of them—denying our vulnerabilities and imperfections, orphaning the parts of us that don't fit in with who/what we think we're supposed to be, and hustling for other people's approval of our worthiness. Perfectionism is exhausting because hustling is exhausting. It's a never-ending performance.

Cultivating meaningful connection is a daring and vulnerable practice that requires grounded confidence, the courage to walk alongside others, and story stewardship.

Like empathy, story stewardship is not walking in someone else's shoes, it's being curious and building narrative trust as they tell you about the experience of being in their own shoes. It's about believing people when they tell you what an experience meant to them.

when we don't care at all what people think and we're immune to hurt, we're also ineffective at connecting. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.

In addition to the fear of disappointing people or pushing them away with our stories, we're also afraid that if we tell our stories, the weight of a single experience will collapse upon us. There is a real fear that we can be buried or defined by an experience that, in reality, is only a sliver of who we are.

If you own this story you get to write the ending. If you own this story you get to write the ending.

from A Love Story, Eight Takes) 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I've invented so much and prevented more. But I'd like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn't love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

Every story matters...We are all worthy of telling our stories and having them heard. We all need to be seen and honored in the same way that we all need to breathe.

I was recognized as being an artist and a storyteller. If Hulk Hogan was the Elvis of wrestling, I was the Robert De Niro.

literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

Siempre me reafirmaba en la idea de que el ser humano es un ser narrante. Más Homo narrans que Homo sapiens.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." [ Letter to Harrison Blake ; November 16, 1857]

Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether it is interesting or not.