Story And Storytelling Quotes

Humans need stories. From childhood, we’re always more drawn to information that comes through a story rather than just facts. Apparently, when we hear a story, our brain lights up – the neural activity increases five fold! Today I’m sharing story and story telling quotes that re-affirm our need for and love of stories.

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”
– Patti Digh

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”
– Terry Tempest Williams

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? Where we have 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.”
– Gabrielle Roth

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”
– J K Rowling

“Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They’re taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don’t want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That’s what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.”
– Alice Walker

“Facts don’t have the power to change someone’s story. Your goal is to introduce a new story that will let your facts in.”
– Annette Simmons

“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
– C G Jung

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
– Maya Angelou

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
– Graham Greene

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”
– Neil Gaiman

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
– Sue Monk Kidd

“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
– Alice Munro

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
– Leo Tolstoy

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
– Erin Morgenstern

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ”
– Alberto Manguel

“Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
– Sylvia Path

“But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”
– Mitch Albom

“Every great love starts with a great story.”
– Nicholas Sparks

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
– Gilda Radner

“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?”
– Yann Martel

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
– Terry Pratchett

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
– Philip Pullman

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
– Haruki Marakami

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”
– Neil Gaiman

“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”
– J K Rowling

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.”
– John Berger

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
– Joan Didion

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
– Ursula K Le Guin

“Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”
– Madeleine L’Engle

“There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story… don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words–the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers who won’t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
– Stephen King

“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”
– Octavia E Bulter

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”
– Arundathi Roy

“But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”
– Wally Lamb

#WritingWednesday

A couple of months ago, we introduced #WritingWednesday on The Frangipani Creative. Do join us.

Prompts:

Fiction: An undercover cop has been posing as a prostitute for years to help stop the practice in her town, but the stakes are high when a famous politician shows up in the bar where she is working that night. (Credit)

Non-fiction: Do you ever update your Facebook status to show your friends how happy you are? Do you know any friends who do that? (Credit)