STORYTELLING RESOURCES FOR STORYTELLERS! Storytelling and Educational Resources & Information for Teachers – Librarians – Storytellers – Homeschoolers Environmentalists – Parents – Grandparents

 

 

 

QUOTATIONS - SOURCES AND MISCELLANEOUS
(from Storytell posts plus original research)

SOURCES

1) http://www.bartleby.com/
Bartleby is the best.
It has the full text of a great number of reference works - several quotation dictionaries, encyclopaedias, thesauri, Gray's Anatomy, Shakespeare, the Bible etc., as well as much classic fiction, all searchable from its drop down list, including Bartlett as shown below. But these won't have modern quotes.


2) http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/
John Bartlett 1919. Over 11,000 Familiar Quotations: Collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced to their sources in Ancient and Modern Literature.


3) http://www.bartleby.com/63/
Simpson's Contemporary Quotations.


4) http://www.quotationreference.com/main.php
QuotationReference.com.


5) http://www.quotations.co.uk/
Quotez - more than 13,500, including modern.


6) http://www.atozquotes.com/
AtoZquotes.com.


7) http://www.Creativequotations.com


8) http://www.ToInspire.com


9) http://www.Cyberquotations.com


10) http://www.aaronshep.com/storytelling/quotes.html
Quotes from Aaron Shepard.


11) http://www.itools.com/lang/
Language Tools - great for unusual searches, eg homophones, antonyms, legal terms and lots more, as well as quotes, dictionaries, translators etc.


12) http://www.perryweb.com/Dickens/quote_main.html
Charles Dickens - Quote Page.


13) http://www.samueljohnson.com
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page.


14) http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln78.html
Abraham Lincoln Quotes.


15) http://www.twainquotes.com
Mark Twain Quotations.


16) http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/
Best Information on the Net page at O'Keefe Library, St Ambrose University. It has loads of resources on many subjects.


17) http://www.phobialist.com/fears.html
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Fear Quotations


18) http://www.starlingtech.com/quotes/
Quotations Page--allows you to search simultaneously through a variety of contemporary sources--quotes by women, 20th century quotes, Dave Barry, and lots more.


19) http://www.quoteland.com/
QuoteLand--search by keyword or by topic, or look through the humorous quotes file or use the links to other quotation references.


20) http://www.rockwisdom.com/mainpage.htm
RockWisdom Song Quotes -- search for a lyric or quote from rock music by category or artist.


21) http://inspirationalquoteoftheday.org/
Includes an inspirational quote of the day, as well as a directory of quotes, from Confucius to Mark Twain.




FRIENDSHIP QUOTATIONS

1) If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.
–Winnie the Pooh


2) True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
–Charles Caleb Colton


3) A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
–Mencius


4) Friends are God's way of taking care of us." "If you should die before me, ask if you could bring a friend.
–Stone Temple Pilots


5) I'll lean on you and you lean on me and we'll be okay.
–Dave Matthew's band


6) If all my friends were to jump off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them, I'd be at the bottom to catch them.
Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say. We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.
–Tim McGraw

7) "My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life."
–-Lee Iacocca


8) Hold a true friend with both your hands.
–Nigerian Proverb


9) A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
–Unknown


10) Friends are God's way of taking care of us.
–Stone Temple Pilots


11) Friends are God's way of apologising for the families he landed us with.
–Source forgotten


12) Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
–Source unknown


13) You are the same today that you'll be five years from now except for two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
–Mac McMillan


14) A Good Friend will help you move...a Best Friend will help you move a dead body.
–George Carlin


15) True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
--Dave Tyson Gentry


16) I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.
– Mark Twain


17) He’s the kind of man who picks his friends -- to pieces.
– Mae West


18) Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.
– Ed Howe


19) Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
–Louise Beal


20) Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
–George Jean Nathan


21) One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
–Henry Adams


22) Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.
–Horace Walpole


23) To find a friend one must close one eye -- to keep him, two.
–Norman Douglas


24) He is a fine friend. He stabs you in the front.
–Leonard Louis Levinson


25) Friendship takes fear from the heart.
–Mahabharata


26) Being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own history. And a time to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
–Gloria Naylor


27) If you drink with a friend, a thousand cups are too few; if you argue with a man, half a sentence is too much.
–Cinese Proverb


28) There is no better mirror than an old friend.
–Japanese Proverb


29) An intelligent enemy is better than a stupid friend.
–Sengalese Proverb



QUOTATIONS ABOUT MEN

Here are some quotes on men from The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women by Rosalie Maggio.

1) Personally, I like two types of men - domestic and foreign.
—Mae West


2) A woman who has known but one man is like a person who has heard only one composer.
—Isadora Duncan


3) A man in the house is worth two in the street.
—Mae West


4) Of all the labor-saving devices ever invented for women, none has ever been so popular as the devoted male.
—Editors of Ladies' Home Journal


5) It's not the men in my life that counts, it's the life in my men.
—Mae West


6) There are far too many men in politics and not enough elsewhere.
—Hermione Gingold


7) We all marry strangers. All men are strangers to all women.
—Mary Heaton Vorse


8) There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.
—Kathleen Norris


9) There are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.
—Mary Roberts Rinehart


10) Testosterone does not have to be toxic.
—Anna Quindlen


11) Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
—Betty Friedan


12) You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
—Marguerite Duras


13) Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy, fat women.
–Nicole Hollander


14) Men don't live well by themselves. They don't even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.
—Rita Rudner


15) What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
—Erma Bombeck


16) My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
—Elayne Boosler


17) I want to know why, if men rule the world, they don't stop wearing neckties.
—Linda Ellerbee


18) Dr. Ruth says we women should tell our lovers how to make love to us. My boyfriend goes nuts if I tell him how to DRIVE!
—Pam Stone


19) Most men are reasonably useful in a crisis. The difficulty lies in convincing them that the situation has reached a critical point.
—Elizabeth Peters


20) Men often marry their mothers.
—Edna Ferber


21) A fox is a wolf who sends flowers.
—Ruth Weston


22) Men would always rather be made love to than talked at.
—Dorothy M. Richardson


23) The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he's a baby.
—Natalie Wood



QUOTES ABOUT EQUALITY

Here are some quotes on equality from The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women by Rosalie Maggio.

1) We don't so much want to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.
—Bella Abzug


2) What I'm working for is the day when a mediocre woman can get as far as a mediocre man. —Anonymous public relations executive quoted in Caroline Bird - Born Female.


3) Whoever walked behind anyone to freedom? If we can't go hand in hand, I don't want to go.
—Hazel Scott


4) Equity speaks softly and wins in the end. But it is expedience, with its loud voice, that sets the time of victory.
—Caroline Bird

PROVERBS

From the Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs.

1) Where there is not equality there never can be perfect love.
—Italian proverb


2) A woman is not a lemon whose quality you can judge at once.
—Hebrew Proverb



MISCELLANEOUS QUOTATIONS

1) As a beauty I am not a star.
There are others more handsome by far.
But my face I don’t mind it, for I am behind it
It’s the people in front get the jar.
—quoted in a Myles na Gopaleen (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) “Cruiskeen Lawn” column, which ran in The Irish Times 1939-66.


2) So ugly he looked like his neck had barfed.
—Chuck Larkin


3) What you can face, you can erase.
— Werner Erhard


4) Keep Death always at your elbow.
— Don Juan in Casteñada books.


5) That's not Love, entity. That's enslavement!
— Ramtha (about infatuation)


6) Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing
There is a field I will meet you there
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
—Rumi


7) Tell a wise person or else keep silent.
—Goethe


8) I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
—Ranier Maria Rilke


9) Last night, as I was sleeping I dreamt - marvellous error! -
That I had a beehive Here inside my heart.
And the golden bees Were making white combs
And sweet honey From my old failures.
—Antonio Machado, trans. by Robert Bly


10) Underworld souls perceive by smelling.
—Heraclitus


11) All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments - all that
Was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe,
Falls into niches and corners before the procession
Of souls along the grand roads of the universe.
—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road


12) Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
—Marshall McLuhan


13) I am so small I can barely be seen. How can this great love be inside me? Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things.
—Rumi


14) The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
—Lily Tomlin


15) What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
—Erica Jong


16) You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one make two. But you must also understand and.
—ancient Sufi teaching


17) Perceive all conflicts as patterns of energy seeking a harmonious balance in a whole.
—Dhyani Ywhoo, Etowah Cherokee


18) ...if we can see the path ahead laid out for us, there is a good chance it is not our path; it is probably someone else's we have substituted for our own. Our own path must be deciphered every step of the way.
—David Whyte


19) The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
—Jelaluddin Rumi


20) One always learns one's mystery at the price of one's innocence.
— Robertson Davies


21) There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.
–Isaac Asimov

22) " Question: If you could live forever, would you and why? Answer: "I would not" live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,"
–Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest.


23) "Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
–Mariah Carey


24) "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
–Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign.


25) "I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body."
–Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.


26) "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
–Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC.


27) "That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it."
–A congressional candidate in Texas.


28) "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."
–John Wayne


29) "Half this game is ninety percent mental."
–Philadelphia Phillies manager, Danny Ozark


30) "It isn't pollution buried deep underground that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are –Al Gore, Vice President


31) "I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix."
–Dan Quayle


32) "It's no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another."
–George Bush, US President


33) "We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
–Lee Iacocca


34) "I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that versio."
–Colonel Oliver North, from his Iran-Contra testimony.


35) "The word 'genius' isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein,"
–Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback &sports analyst.


36) "We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people."
–Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instructor.


37) "We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur."
–Al Gore, VP


38) "Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas."
–reputed to have been said by Keppel Enderbery


39) "Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."
–Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina


40) "If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record."
–Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman


41) Let the beauty you love, be what you do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Rumi


42) The gods look with favor on superior daring.
–Civilis, quoted in Tacitus' History


43) Consciousness is a disease.
Miguel de Unamumo, 1864-1937, The Tragic Sense of Life
–

44) The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
–Marcel Proust


45) The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
–John Cheever


46) The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
–Ernest Hemingway


47) We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time."
–T. S. Eliot


48) Human beings are the only creatures who allow their children to come home.
–Bill Cosby


49) SUCCESS
You can reach any goal...
IF you know what the goal is;
IF you really want it;
IF it is a good goal;
IF you believe you can reach it;
IF you work to achieve it;
IF you think positively.
–Dr. Norman Vincent Peale


50) FAVORITE QUOTE
One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire -- then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.
–Robert Fulghum






SAYINGS OF FAMOUS MOTHERS

1) PAUL REVERE'S MOTHER: "I don't care where you think you have to go, young man. Midnight is past your curfew!"


2) HUMPTY DUMPTY'S MOTHER: "Humpty, If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times not to sit on that wall. But would you listen to me?"


3) COLUMBUS' MOTHER: "I don't care what you've discovered, Christopher. You still could have written!"


4) MICHELANGELO'S MOTHER: "Why can't you draw on the walls like the other children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that stuff off the ceiling?"


5) NAPOLEON'S MOTHER: "All right, Napoleon. Take your hand out of there and let me see what you're hiding!"


6) MONA LISA'S MOTHER: "After all that money your father and I spent on braces, Mona, that's the biggest smile you can give us?"


7) ALBERT EINSTEIN'S MOTHER: "But Albert, it's your senior picture. Can't you do something about your hair?"


8) BATMAN'S MOTHER: "It's a very nice car, Bruce, but do you realize how much the insurance is going to cost?"


9) GOLDILOCKS' MOTHER: "I've got a bill here for a broken chair from the Bear family. Do you know anything about this, Goldie?"


10) LITTLE MISS MUFFET'S MOTHER: "All I've got to say is, if you don't get off your tuffet and start cleaning your room, there'll be a lot more spiders around here!"


11) GEORGE WASHINGTON'S MOTHER: "The next time I catch you throwing money across the river, you can kiss your allowance good-bye!"


12) JONAH'S MOTHER: "That's a nice story, Jonah. Now tell me where you've really been for the last three days.

 

 

STORY AND STORYTELLING - ART AND WRITING QUOTATIONS

1) There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
—Maya Angelou


2) His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.
—John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892 - 1973


3) Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"
—Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen, 1885 - 1962


4) Through his mastery of storytelling techniques, he has managed to separate his character, in the public mind, from his actions as president.... He has, in short, mesmerized us with that steady gaze.
—Jean Nathan Miller, about Ronald Reagan


5) The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic and the witty upon the matter.
—Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910


6) I don't care what happens to me as long as it makes a better story later.
— pianist Artur Rubinstein from his autobiography, My Younger Years.


7) We are a people in desperate need of stories, so needy that we don't care much about the value of the story, as long as it absorbs our attention and stirs our emotions.
—Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life


8) Culture is not about what is absolute, real, or true. It's about what a group of people get together and agree to believe. Culture can be healthy or toxic, nurturing or murderous. Culture is made of stories...
—Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight


9) Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us; we shall go on quietly craving it.
—Laura Riding


10) Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even of finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
—Harriet Goldhor Lerner


11) When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike.... A story is what it's like to be a human being -- to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise.
—Maya Angelou


12) Because we are all learners together, our core challenge and opportunity is to discover our compelling evolutionary story together - a new "common sense," a sense of reality, identity, and social purpose that can mobilize our collective efforts and elicits our enthusiastic participation in creating a new life together.
—Duane Elgin, Promise Ahead


13) This is the truth. It's all true. Every word that anyone ever tells you is true. If you could just open far enough, Make the effort to understand. It is time to destroy the myth of the artist. We are all artists. We need to become better art appreciators. There's plenty of great creation. We need great listeners, great readers, great perceivers. Great receptors. It's all true; what's hard is not saying truth but accepting truth. Embracing truth. That is greatness. Open up.
—Paul Williams, Das Energi


14) Without stories, we have no way to recollect ourselves when our personal world shatters.
—Marion Woodman, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World


15) It's not just that we have lost our story, but that we had to lose it, because every age needs its own wisdom. Clinging to old stories is not only dangerous and foolish, it keeps a culture stale and without imagination... And that means that those who carry the wisdom for our time cannot be simply storytellers. They'll have to be story-listeners, story-evokers, artists, and teachers of every sort who can call forth the stories we need now... And everywhere that harbingers of a new mythos are appearing, Cultural Creatives are preparing the way.
—Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World


16) We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things ... we have given someone something, that, like a person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts, and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less oneself. But it's just the opposite... These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes ... What does he care where it is, who sees it ...? He leaves it where it molts.
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius


17) (... on our personal stories) I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware ... Have it. Take it from me. Do with it what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius


18) I think, that at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1983)


19) Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
– Rudyard Kipling


20) The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
–Muriel Rukeyser, poet


21) Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
–Robert McKee


22) It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.
–Native American saying.


23) There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
–Elie Wiesel


24) Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
–Thoreau


25) I will tell you something about stories, (he said)
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death
–Leslie Marmon Silko


26) The first draft of everything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway


27) Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
–John Barth


28) In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
–Walter Cronkite

29) It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular storyteller, it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously, the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.
–Loren Eiseley, The Mind as Nature


30) Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.
–Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) U.S. critic, social reformer, writer


31) It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
–Isadora Duncan


32) Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
–Anais Nin


33) Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
–Robert McKee, at his Story Structure Workshop, 1999


34) A human being is nothing but a story with a skin around it.
–Fred Allen


35) Fiction is not photography, it’s oil painting.
–Robertson Davies


36) The dirty secret of art is you don’t have to show people your bad writing. That’s what we have the delete key for.
–Robert McKee


37) The best defense is a good story.
–Frederick Bush, on NPR, prof of literature, Colgate Univ.


38) The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of art to awaken. We weep but we are not wounded. We grieve but our grief is not bitter."
–Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist


39) Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
–Robert Lynd


40) I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
–Demian, by Herman Hesse, 1925


41) In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
–Rachel Carson


42) The history of the greatest princes is often the story of men's mistakes.
–Voltaire, La Siecle de Louis XIV, chap.XI


43) People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
–Steven Spielberg


44) I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
–Steven Spielberg


45)If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.
–George Lucas


46) Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
–Chinua Achebe (1930 - ____) Nigerian novelist, Award Lecture, "What Has Literature Got to Do With It?," In "Sokoto," 23 Aug 1986.


47) It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.
–Tom Brokaw


48) We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
–Anatole Broyard


49) Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. . . . You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
–Angela Carter


50) A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
–Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959)


51) All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . . religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.
–Harvey Cox (1929 - ____) US theologian, social reformer, author


52) The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.
–Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)


53) Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
–Alfred Hitchcock


54) The highest-paid person in the first half of the next century will be the "storyteller." The value of products will depend on the story they tell. Nike and many other gloabal companies are already manily storytellers. That is where the money is --- even today.
–Rolf Jensen


55) We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many "authorities," none of which are our own. The parable of the postmodern mind is the person surrounded by a media center: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we're saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don't have a point of view and we don't have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.
–Sam Keen


56) Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renaiscent truth. this approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
–Mary Catherine Bateson


57) Classic narrative is basically linear. It is like a river which has a source in an inland spring. The water bubbles up from the ground and sets off on a journey, pushed forward by the energy generated at its source. It twists and turns and gains momentum according to the obstacles in its path, as if it always has one aim in view; to finally reach and unite with its destination, the sea.
–Cherry Potter


58) The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
–Mark Twain


58) The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
–Barbara Deming


59) A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
–Isaac Singer


60) A song ain't nothin' in the world but a story just wrote with music to it.
–Hank Williams, Sr. (1923 - 1953)


61) I wrote the story myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it.
–Mae West


62) In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. . . . You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
–Doris Lessing


63) Stories are equipment for living.
–Kenneth Burke


64) If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
–Orson Welles


65) Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
–Hannah Arendt


66) Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
–Robert Bresson

67) Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
–Gene Fowler


68) Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
–Anne Rice


69) Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
–Gustave Flaubert


70) We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
–Henry James


71) You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.
–Rita Mae Brown


72) Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
–Edgar Allen Poe


73) No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
–Robert Frost


74) Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
–Peter Abelard, in "Letter S, Abelard to Heloise"


75) The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.
Leo Rosten


76)Writers are only rarely likable.
Joan Didion


77) The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin


78) There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham


79) Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.
–Margaret Chase Smith


80) When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it."
–Margaret Chase Smith


81) When we are little we learn to talk. When we are old, we learn to be quiet. That is one of the shortcomings of human beings; we learn to speak before we learn to be quiet.
Attributed to Rabbi Nahman of Breslov by Daniel Stuhlman


82) I had rather sound like the cab drivers cursing at one another, like the longshoremen yelling, like the cowhand whooping and like the lone wolf barking, than to sound like a slick, smooth tongued, oily lipped, show person.
–Elizabeth Partridge.


83) The babe in the cradle knows about the dragon. He needs the stories to know about St. George.
–G. K. Chesterton


84) There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe by which you can have in your writing what you do not possess in yourself. Understand that you cannot keep out of your writing whatever evil or shallowness you entertain in yourself...
–Walt Whitman


85) There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
–Anais Nin


86) The story is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
–Ursula Le Guin

Responses:

a) I particularly love this quote (which incidentally was also quoted by Dear Abby at around the same time -- must have been in the air!) but I don't recall seeing a citation for the work in which it appeared?? No question that she wrote it -- several of her novels have storytelling as a key element -- but I'd like a source citation. Maybe it's something of hers I haven't read yet, and would surely enjoy!

b) I suspect that the quote came from one of her collections of essays, in which she tends to talk a lot about story. I have Dancing on the Edge of the World (1989), and I just checked the two essays in it dated 1979, but didn’t find it. It is more likely that it is in her earlier collection, The Language of the Night, which I thought I owned but can’t find on my shelves. That collection was published in 1979, bringing together essays that had been written earlier – and it is wonderful. If anyone does have that collection and the time to look through it, my guess is you might be able to find the quote. Now where did that book go?

c) The story -- from 'Rumplestiltskin' to 'War and Peace' -- is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. 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, 1979That has a date on it, but WHERE was it published? I had a look on the web and found that it seems to have been quoted first there by Dear Abby, at
http://www.azcentral.com/home/columns/articles/0529abby0529.html
It gives her mailing address, so you could ask her where she found it (but that might be a quotation dictionary, which rarely have full citations). But I did find a whole webpage of Le Guin quotes at
http://www.angelfire.com/realm/firelight63/Words_LeGuin_Ursula.htm

See below for some of them. And also follow the links on this page to find more about Le Guin, which might help with searching out the quote. This page http://www.levity.com/corduroy/leguin.htm has a good list of links to bibliographies, articles, interviews etc which may be the quote source.Ursula Le Guin:
1. "As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."
4. I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
5. If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
6. In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
10. The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here
and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
11. The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.
14. To oppose something is to maintain it.
15. "True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero--really look--and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. 'You must change your life,' he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that isalways its message. You must change your life."
19. You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A Wizard's power of changing and summoning can shake a balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power ... To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
20. "You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do."
Comment: I found it!! Reprinted on Page 31 of The Language of the Night, quoted from Ursula LeGuin's article Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing in The Living Light 7:3 (Fall 1970). So although LoN was published in 1979, the quote's date is 1970. Here's the way she actually wrote it: "For the story -- from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace -- is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."

The previous sentence reads: "And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would knot know quite fully what it is to be human." (would "grow up to be an eggplant," as she said elsewhere). Wise ones, you would be interested to hear LeGuin say that the Fantasy genre continues the ancient tradition of myths and wondertales (in contrast to our navel-gazing "realistic" literature, which is a modern aberration). Science fiction is just a particularly detailed futuristic form of this ancient tradition. (Of course she's talking about literary SF, not the spacewars & bugeyedmonsters movies.) If you have an interest in myth or in the craft of writing, this collection of her essays is worth seeking out!

87) Just when we needed every ounce of brainpower at our command, his ounce was missing,
–Pogo


88) When the world says, 'Give up,' / Hope whispers, 'Try it one more time.'
–Anon.


89) Until the lion tells the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
–Source unknown


90) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
– Albert Einstein

Responses:

a) That is one of my favorite quotes! I use it often in my education lectures.

b) Here's what my searching turned up.
From http://www.surlalunefairytales.com

The following is the intro to an article in the December issue of Victoria titled: "Jackie Wullschlager: the fairy-tale lady" by Claire Whitcomb.
"Once upon a time, recounts Jackie Wullschlager, a mother asked Albert Einstein what she should read to her scientifically minded son. "Fairy stories," he replied, nodding his cloud of white hair. "And then what?" the mother asked, awaiting the names of complicated treatises. "More fairy stories," Einstein answered.

c) I found several sites that quoted this story but no one could substantiate it. At
http://www.bartleby.com however, I did find the following quote:
NUMBER: 4991
AUTHOR: Albert Einstein
QUOTATION: The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
ATTRIBUTION: Quoted in Washington Post 6 Mar 85
SUBJECTS: Humankind: Wisdom, Philosophy & Other Musings
BIOGRAPHY: Columbia Encyclopedia.
WORKS: Albert Einstein Collection.the surlalunefairytales site is an intriging one. They have interesting disussions on fairy tales like "what is your Favorite disgusting character?"

90) Here are my two favorite quotes about Art. I think these two together sum up my complete feelings on storytelling and art in general and what I do.

Nature is everything man is born into. Art is the difference he makes in it.
–John Erskine

If I hadn't started painting, I probably would have raised chickens.
–Grandma Moses


91) I keep storytelling quotes on my Web site, too. Take at look at
http://talesandlegends.net
Enter and click on "Insights."
Many of my quotes were collected right here!


92) So, I am listening to Natalie Goldman's tape of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, when she quotes John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist. I thought I would share with you."Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which in normal people are signs of either immaturity or incivility:
Wit;
A tendency to make irreverent connections;
Obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness;
A refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be true;
Childishness;
An apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose;
A fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies;
A lack of proper respect;
Mischievousness;
An unseemly propensity for crying over nothing;
A marked tendency towards oral or anal fixation or both;
The oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking or chattering;
The anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness, coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes;
Remarkable powers of recall or visual memory, a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation;
A strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the later often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion;
Patience like a cat's;
A criminal streak of cunning;
Psychological instability;
Recklessness;
Impulsiveness;
Improvidence;
And finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, either written or oral, bad or good.
Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course, occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident."140)

Profound Post-Modern Axioms
1) Life isn't like a box of chocolates, it's more like a jar of jalapeños -- you never know what's going to burn you in the butt!
2) I love deadlines. I especially like the Whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
3) Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
4) Needing someone is like needing a parachute. If they aren't there the first time, chances are you won't be needing them again.
5) I don't have an attitude problem, you have a perception problem.
6) Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the hell is the ceiling?
7) My reality check bounced.
8) On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key.
9) I don't suffer from stress. I am a carrier!
(10) You are slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.
(11) Everyone is someone else's weirdo.
(12) Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
(13) Be careful . . .a pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the behind!
(14) Don't be irreplaceable - if you can't be replaced, you won't be promoted.
(15) The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get.
(16) You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.
(17) So this isn't Home Sweet Home . . . Adjust!
(18) Ring bell for maid service. If no answer, do it yourself!
(19) I came, I saw, I decided to order take out.
(20) Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused.
(21) What should you give a man who has everything? A woman to show him how to work it!
(22) How can you tell which bottle contains her PMS medicine? It's the one with bite marks on the cap!


93) Papa Joe says that his:
"If you want to be a storyteller, tell stories. If you want to be a better storyteller, tell more stories" is a re-working of Einstein. Perhaps Einstein's original line was more like this. I often use Papa Joe's dictum in workshops, so would also appreciate knowing more about the original.


94) Recently, and on previous occasions, we've shared quotations that were apropos to our art. While reading the June 2002 issue of The Writer, I came across an article by Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, etc.--librarians and children's book lovers, did I get those titles correct?). She's a favorite of mine. The article concludes with this paragraph:
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. We look at the world around us, and it is a complex world, full of incomprehensible greed, irrationality, brutality, war, terrorism--but also self-sacrifice, honor, dignity--and in all of this we look for, and usually find, pattern, structure, meaning. Our truest reesponse to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
–Madeleine L'Engle, from Madeleine L'Engle (Herself) Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life (Writers' Palette), compiled by Carole F. Chase.


95) How about this for our "Quote file"? I also applies to marketing, you have to go out after things that your potential customers need instead of waiting for them to call you about what you have to offer.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
–Dale Carnegie


96) Here's a quote I use in one of my workshops:
If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, it needs better promotion.


97) Believe in your story. Believe in your audience. Believe in yourself. To me, those three things should be the guiding lights of a storyteller, whether beginning or seasoned. But especially for the beginner, who is usually full of self-doubt, uncertain about the story choice, uneasy about how he/she will be accepted by the audience. Believe the story you have to tell is the right story, the best story for the time, place and audience.

Believe that the audience wants to hear it, will be glad that they have heard it, and will be glad that it was you who told it to them. Believe that you are the best person to tell this story to these people at this time, and that you will tell it the best way for them to hear it.


98) During my first years of creative transformation when I felt like I was juggling two personas inside my physical body the whole time I was telling stories, I was given some good advice from Papa Joe. He mentioned 4 Foundation Concepts, and I found that they have held true for me and helped me over many hurdles since then.

Know that your listeners want you to succeed.
Use the words that suit you.
Tell to one listener at a time.
Understand your listener's needs.
For a long time I had copies of them taped up over my computer, slipped inside my notebook for gigs, and pasted prominently on the front of my journals. They were true for me back then as a beginner, just as they are now for me a little further down the path.


99) I heard a good one just tonight from Abingdon, Virginia storyteller, G. Lee Hearl. "The nice thing about storytelling is that it enables you to recapture your first childhood when you're in your second childhood."


100) Quotes on the value of listening:
Listen and hear not only what you thought you wanted to hear. Listen and hear what you have to learn.
–Ralph S. Marston, Jr.

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
–Native American Proverb

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
–Dr. Joyce Brothers


101) I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
–Ursula K. Le Guin


102) Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.
–Etty Hillesum


103) A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the minute a single man contemplates it bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
–Antoine De Saint-Exupery, French author..aviator


104) Whatever you can do or dream you can...
Begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now."
–Goethe


105) We are all Divine gifts of God. Each life a powerful thread contributing to a much larger tale! What a wonderful, rich tapestry we share.
–Angela Davis, the Yarnspinner


106) Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering. –Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer.


107) Imagination is the eye of the soul.
–Joseph Joubert


108) We cannot sow seeds with clenched fists. To sow we must open our hands.
–Adolfo Perez Esquivel


109) We need more front porch storytelling... because every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burned down.
—Amadou Hampate Ba, a griot from the Mandingo people of West Africa


110) It is only possible to live happily ever after one day at a time.
–Unknown


111) Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, "WOW - What a Ride!"
–Unknown


112) A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectation.
–Unknown


113) As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
– Gary Snyder

This comes from today's issue of The Writer's Almanac, an e-zine linked to A Prairie Home Companion. It brings a poem and often-fascinating brief biographies of writers to my inbox daily.


114) Sometimes we need a story more than food.
–Barry Lopez's "Crow and Weazel," page 60 in my HarperPerennial soft cover. It is one of my VERY favorite quotes.


115) A decent collection of quotes at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/quotes.html
has this warning:
"© Copyright Notice: the quotations collection on this Web page is copyright © 1994-2004 by Professor Gabriel Robins. Permission is hereby granted to anyone to make copies of this Web page, either in part or in its entirety, including using any part of the collection above in published works, as long as: (1) Professor Gabriel Robins is properly cited/credited as the creator of this quotations collection, including a Web link to the above link; and (2) this copyright notice is included in all copies made of this collection, be it electronic, written, or any other format."

So if you pirate any of these gems while you're telling stories, make sure you know what to call that squiggly thing before "robins". If you're speaking to lexicographers, call it a swung dash; if linguists, a tilde (for Spanish, anyway); if normal people, we'll all know what you mean if you say "squiggly thing". I enjoyed some of the bitchy comments on books.

This book fills a much-needed gap.
–Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.
–Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
–Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

I have read your book and much like it.
–Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

The covers of this book are too far apart.
–Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/oasis/profiles/hadas.php
Moses Hadas (Columbia University New York)

Although he was known as a quiet, even shy man, Moses Hadas made his presence felt at the College as a prolific scholar and as one of the College's truly great teachers. A classicist by training, he began teaching as an instructor in the General Honors course in 1925, and except for brief service in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, he stayed at Columbia for the rest of his career, remaining one of the College's most sought-after teachers until his death in 1966.

Born in Atlanta, Hadas received his bachelor's degree from Emory University in 1922, and came to Columbia to do advanced work in Greek and Latin literature. Even as his own academic accomplishments mounted, Hadas continued to embrace undergraduate education. After teaching General Honors, he taught the Colloquium on Important Books; he was one of the original teachers of Humanities A and continued to teach it for years. It was said of Hadas that he "always had enough time to discuss anything of humane interest with the demanding young." Little wonder that, as a teacher, he was often mentioned in the same breath as Mark Van Doren. Early on Hadas won recognition as a gifted scholar, not only of Greek and Latin, but also of Hebrew and Arabic. A colleague once remarked that Hadas knew most classical authors "as if he had just met them at a faculty meeting." Among his distinguished books on classical culture were A History of Greek Literature (1950) and Humanism: The Greek Ideal and Its Survival (1960); he translated Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts; and he edited many other volumes.


116) This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
–Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
Ever hear any stories that you thought this applied?

117) The best evidence of intelligent life out there is that none of them have contacted us.
–John Fistere


118) I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to happen.
–Frank Lloyd Wright,
Keep this in mind when you want to be a full time storyteller.


119) No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
–Heraclitus, philosopher (c. 540-470 BCE)


120) Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.
–Khalil Gibran


121) The bravest thing in the world is that writer who sits alone in a room and works out his grief, his rage, his imagination and his deep desire to make people laugh. And he makes a work of art that then transforms the world with the truth, because that's all we want, you know. It's all we need.
–Meryl Streep, actress

122) Nothing in modern media can compare to being face to face with a person and feeling that person's heart and soul being poured into the images and action of their stories.
–Joseph Sobol


123) I'd rather walk on my lips than spread gossip about somebody.
–Barbara McBride-Smith


124) So often we dwell on the things that seem impossible rather than on the things that are possible. So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.
–Marian Wright Edelman


125) If one could only learn to appreciate the little things...
A song that takes you away, for there are those who cannot hear.
The beauty of a sunset, for there are those who cannot see.
The warmth and safety of your home, for there are those who are homeless.
Time spent with good friends for there are those who are lonely.
A walk along the beach for there are those who cannot walk.
The little things are what life is all about.
Search your soul and learn to appreciate.
–Shadi Souferian

126) I have suffered a great many catastrophes in my life...most of which never happened.
– Mark Twain

127) That which would give light must endure burning.
–Victor Frankel.

128) The acquiescence to evil is the worst form of evil.
–Elie Wisel


129) Education (Storytelling) is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
–William Butler Yeats


130) Storytelling Quotations available at:
http://www.storynet-advocacy.org/news/quotes.shtml


131) We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
–Auster, Paul - 1947 American Writer

132) Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
–Benjamin, Walter - 1982-1940 German Critic Philosopher

133) The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
–Benjamin, Walter - 1982-1940 German Critic Philosopher

134) One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
–Bruyere, Jean De La - 1645-1696 French Classical Writer

135) There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
–Cather, Willa - 1876-1947 American Author

136) A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
–Chandler, Raymond - 1888-1959 American Author

137) In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Guin, Ursula K. Le - 1929 American Author

138) Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
–Hawthorne, Nathaniel - 1804-1864 American Novelist Short Story Writer

139( Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
–Hemingway, Ernest - 1898-1961 American Writer

140) Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
–Hoffer, Eric - 1902-1983 American Author Philosopher

141) The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.
–Hugo, Victor - 1802-1885 French Poet Dramatist Novelist

142) We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
–Plato - BC 427-347 Greek Philosopher

143) We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say -- and to feel -- Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.
–Steinbeck, John - 1902-1968 American Author

144) The first law of story-telling. Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.
–Ward, Mrs. Humphrey - 1851-1920 British Novelist

150) Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
–C.S. Lewis


151) Modern storytellers are the descendents of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.” 
–Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run  With the Wolves

152) Every child, and the child in every one of us, is ready to plead: Tell me a story. For the role of stories is to explain life, and the good stories, in their very substance and in the structutre of their language, become revelation.
–Andrew M. Greeley


153) Everyone may not be a fascinating storyteller, but everyone does have a fascinating story. Listen for it.
–Peter Greenberg


154) Passing this quote along.
Folk tales are real. Taken together, they offer...a general explanation of life preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciences; folk stories are the catalog of potential destinies of men and women, especially for that stage in life when destiny is formed, i.e., youth-beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the future; then the departure from home, and finally, through the trials of growing up the attainment of maturity."
–Italo Calvino
Karen C. 10/22/05


155) The Folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
–Joesph Campbell
John C. 10/27/05


156) Our opinions of ourselves and others come from the telling and retelling of stories.
–Allison Alfonso 1/2/06


157) Don't say the old lady screamed-bring her on and let her scream.
–Mark Twain
NSN 1/4/06


158) To be Human is to be a storyteller. A computer can tell us how many words are in a story, correct some spelling errors, and execute other mechanical tasks--but it doesn't have a clue to what the story is about. Conversely, although children will miscount the words and miss many spelling errors, they can easily tell us the gist of the story--and even imaginatively recount the story in their own words.
–Barbara K. Walker, The Art of the Turkish Tale, Vol. 2
Mary Grace K. 9/13/07


159) I have compiled the list of quotes that you wonderful people sent me. Thank you so much for all the help.

Tom D. suggested:
• Where children are, there is a Golden Age." Perhaps this might be a beginning....
– Novalis (German poet, mystic and philosopher, 1772-1802)

Karen C. sent this:
• The story will be with us as long as man is. You know that, in part, because of its effect on children. It's through story they realize that mystery won't kill them. Through story they learn they have a future."
–Bernard Malamud

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
–Albert Einstein

Dianne H. said:
• One of my favorite quotes is from a first grader who said, after having heard me tell a story "I saw it in my mind, better than on TV."

Jackie B. and Mary Lee S. suggested this:
Here's Martha's and Mitch's take on it.
Lots of sound bites here...
http://beautyandthebeaststorytellers.com/Handouts/WhyChildren.pdf

Steve O. submitted:
I was recently at the National Conference of the National Storytelling Network, and I attended a workshop where the following quote by Gail E. Haley from her 1971 Caldecott Medal acceptance speech was given to us. This is really the essence of what READ from the START is all about.

• Children who are not spoken to by responsive adults will not learn to speak properly. Children who are not answered will stop asking questions. They will become incurious. And children who are not told stories and who are not read to will have few reasons for wanting to learn to read.

Kate D. suggested these:
Here are some quotes I collected a while ago about the power of story. I think the first one speaks best to why tell children stories. But maybe you'll like some of the others...

• Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
–G. K. Chesterton

• If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
–Barry Lopez, as Badger in Crow and Weasel

• The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

• The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
–Muriel Rukeyser, American poet

• We need more front porch storytelling...because every time an old person dies, it‚s like a library burned down.
–Amadou Hampate Ba, a griot (village storyteller) from the Mandingo people of West Africa

• Stories save lives. That's what happened on the island closest to the Asian tsunami on December 26, 2004. Stories handed down by elders told of the devastation caused by the earthquakes and tsunamis in the early 1800's and early 1900's. The stories ended with a caution: when the earth shakes, run for the hills. On December 26, 70,000 islanders remembered the stories and did just that. No one was on shore when the tsunami hit it, and no one died in the tsunami. They were saved by the stories.

• It is the duty of the present to convey the voices of the past to the ears of the future.
– a Norwegian saying


160) Some people think we're made of flesh and blood and bones.
Scientists say we're made of atoms.
But I think we're made of stories.
When we die, that's what people remember,
The stories of our lives and the stories we told.
–Ruth Stotter
Shelby S. 9/13/07

Created 2001; last update 11/15/09

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