Quotes About Storytelling

The bare branches were silvered with frost. The berries of the holly tree looked white with rime. Old Marie said that all holly berries had once been white, but that the crown of thorns had been made of holly, and the berries had turned red when touched with Jesus's blood. She had a story to explain everything, Old Marie.

But we're all characters in our own stories, Iggy.

believe me it is not. Better still, let me prove it. From prehistoric cave paintings to the map of the London Underground, images, diagrams and charts have long been at the heart of human storytelling. The reason why is simple: our brains are wired for visuals. 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it speaks,' wrote the media theorist John Berger in the opening lines of his 1972 classic, Ways of Seeing.

I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting places to set my books. But as the characters come first, who they are will usually dictate where a book is set.

Story is revealed not in telling, but in listening.

It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.

I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.

Every memory we have changes slightly each time we think about it. We add stuff we learn in other places, or we forget stuff that doesn't seem important anymore. Or you think you remember something, like from your childhood, but actually you've just seen so many pictures of it, and your parents have told you about it, so you think you remember it, but you don't. A memory is a process. Instead of a thing. Like a story we tell ourselves that changes from the standpoint we're looking at it.

Fairy Tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

Where we stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don't make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you're always good, the story will be very short.

Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. "A maze," he would say, "is a video game distilled to its purest form." Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

We walk back to town, and he looks at me seriously and he says, 'Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don't say it was closed.' The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam.

For instance, your life is a lie, and she never lies. When she heard the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, she barely understood it. "Of course he told the truth. The chopping down of a cherry tree would be a very big thing to cover up," she said.

To begin, it is narrated by Death!

If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.

Most of our customers have rather liked The Book Thief.

All stories—anecdotes, cave paintings, blog posts, book reviews, news articles, songs, poems—are attempts to explain the world to each other and for ourselves.

As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story.

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.

The story can also serve as a philosophy for getting on in society – to teach the morally superior man that each day he should investigate his own personal conduct, or that human life is suffering, or that suffering in life derives from the self. Or the story could be developed into numerous intricate and complex theories. It all depends on how the storyteller tells it.

Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.