Quotes About Storytelling

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.

The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough.

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply.

The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: The Maker of all things loves and wants me. Christians still believe in that truth.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)

Foreign films, Cliff thought, were more like novels. They didn't care if you liked the main character or not. And Cliff found that intriguing.

Don't get ahead of the story,lad. You see, it's a very long story- because Danny Lubbins was at sea on that tiny slip of a plank raft... for three hundred days.

We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it, As though we had written it.

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

Anyone can listen to an exciting story; but a good listener is like a determined gold prospector patiently digging through the mud to find a little nugget of the prized metal.

We are fictioneers.

She wondered what it was about storytelling that made people want it almost as much as food and water, even more so in bad times than good. Movies had never drawn more patrons than during the Great Depression. Book sales often improved in a recession. The need went beyond a mere desire for entertainment and distraction from one's troubles. It was more profound and mysterious than that.

Do you know Aesop? The fable titled 'The Great and the Little Fishes'?

She told him that she wished he would come to life for her, the way that he had come to life in the wonderful story, and she really did wish it, want it, need it. She could so clearly see him rising from the page of the book as he had risen from the baker's tray before setting out into the city. When the incident began, it was pure Disney. But not for long.

They were stories of things that had never happened and could never happen, but she told them with such quiet verve and conviction that we believed them and wanted to continue believing even after time robbed us of our sense of wonder.

Lively conversation would have helped her remain alert, but Trahern was not a raconteur with a trove of sparkling anecdotes.

So dating is a great opportunity to hear someone else's stories. Listen to them actively and empathetically—and even share some of your own when it's appropriate—but don't kill the conversation with domination. Listening is a great way to find out if there's something worth pursuing in that person sitting across from you.

There was nothing more satisfying than taking all the jumbled pieces and putting them together one by one to recreate the picture—the story—of the crime in question.

One night Shay heard the quiet murmur of his voice, punctuated by Olivia's giggles. She shuffled across the living room and listened around the corner. He was reading aloud to her, imitating each character's voice. Shay listened to his falsetto, a grin tugging her lips at the incongruity of a cowboy reading The Princess Diaries.