Below are a few quotations and links to stimulate the conversation about storytelling…
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” – Hannah Arendt
“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
“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.” – George Eliot
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
“Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.” – Ray Bradbury
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” – Willa Cather
“Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It’s a paradox that’s at the heart of any kind of storytelling.” – Jeremy Northam
“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” – Jean-Luc Godard
“I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.” – Kendrick Lamar
“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” – Raymond Chandler
“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” – Umberto Eco
“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ” – Chris Cleave
“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
“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” – Willa Cather
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” – Philip Pulman
“To hell with facts! We need stories!” – Ken Kesey
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” – Patrick Rothfuss
“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” – Neil Gaiman
“You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.” – Stephen King
“Stories give shape to experience and allow us to go through life unblind. Without them, the stuff that happens would float around in some glob and none of it would mean anything. Once you have a version of what happened, all the other good stuff about being human can come into play. You can laugh, feel awe, commit a compassionate act, get pissed, and want to change things.” – Norman Maclean
“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” – Toni Morrison
Morrison sees her writing functioning much like storytelling did in the past. It reminds people about their heritage and shows them their place in the community. Read more …