Story Telling Quotes

“You are never too old to become younger!”
― Mae West

“While Leo fussed over his helm controls, Hazel and Frank relayed the story of the fish-centaurs and their training camp.
'Incredible,' Jason said. 'These are really good brownies.'
'That's your only comment?' Piper demanded.
He looked surprised. 'What? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these brownies--'
'I know,' Frank said, his mouth full. 'Try them with Ester's peach preserves.'
'That,' Hazel said, 'is incredibly disgusting.'
'Pass me the jar, man,' Jason said.
Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys.”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

“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, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.”
― Vera Nazarian, Dreams Of The Compass Rose

“All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.”
― Vera Nazarian, Dreams Of The Compass Rose

“Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.”
― April Genevieve Tucholke, Wink Poppy Midnight

“That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
― Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith

“Her eyes were distant, and she seemed to be listening to that voice that first told her the story, a mother, sister, or aunt. Then her voice, like her singing, cut through the crickets and crackling fire.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher..”
― Patti Davis

“I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.”
― Vera Nazarian, Dreams Of The Compass Rose

“There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet, ...truth and courage prevail and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.”
― Gyula Illyes, Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales

“Every story needs to be worth telling.”
― Vera Nazarian

“There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.
The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.
But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs.”
― Gyula Illyes, Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales

“All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.
That's what the kids in Mrs. Miller's class think, but I'm the only Persian they've ever met, so I don't know where they got that idea.
My mom says it's true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn't. Persians aren't liars. They're poets, which is worse.
Poets don't even know when they're lying. They're just trying to remember their dreams. They're trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
In one version, maybe I'm not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller's class. I'm a prince in disguise.
If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. "Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange."
That's how they all begin.
With a promise. If you listen, I'll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we're not enemies anymore.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.”
― Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

“These tales, without exception, express the truth that justice triumphs in the end. They all contain the idea that it is worth while to fight for the truth, in any situation.
In this fight man is assisted by more powerful beings than ordinary mortals. And the triumph of justice is the only sense and consolation in this world. Indeed, the world itself started out with this hope. The human race received it long, long ago as a cradle-song.”
― Gyula Illyes, Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales

“Ich würde von jedermann, ob hoch oder niedrig, verlangen, dass er mir einfach und geradezu mit dem kommt, was er mir erzählen will, oder aber seine Geschichte zusammenrollt und sich darauf setzt und Ruhe gibt. Übertretungen dieses Gesetzes müssten mit dem Tode bestraft werden.”
― Mark Twain

“Once you realize it’s not your job to be a brand, your energy shifts. You embrace the cultural legacy you wish to build. You don’t wonder how to be authentic. You are authentic. You don’t succumb to trends. You exist beyond them. You tell your unique story. You create your world.”
― Joy Donnell, Beyond Brand: Master Your Power, Joy, and Media To Live Your Legacy

“Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“the shape of all stories: the enduring pattern of how someone is found by being lost. All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Here is also a direction. It’s impossible to have any trajectory or speed of motion without starting here. Here is our beginning, and every great story requires an origin.”
― Joy Donnell, Beyond Brand: Master Your Power, Joy, and Media To Live Your Legacy

“That’s the funny thing about stories — like all living things, they need to adapt and evolve in order to survive in their environment. Consider for a second that you can drop the same exact species into ten different ecosystems and within a few dozen generations, they could be hardly recognizable from their original form or to each other. The same is true for stories. They mutate to fit the cognitive conditions of each person’s specific mental habitat. That’s why a group of people can experience the same exact event, and within a decade or two, the story of that event can be wildly different as told by each person who experienced it.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Every story has a story. And always more important than a story itself, is the reason behind why it was told.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Mr. Bagggins saw then how clever Gandalf had been. The interruptions had really made Beorn more interested in the story, and the story had kept him from sending the dwarves off at once like suspicious beggars. He never invited people into his house, if he could help it. He had very few friends and they lived a good way away; and he never invited more than a couple of these to his house at a time. Now he had got fifteen strangers sitting in his porch!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“For those who never be in the labor ward where everyone arrival at hospital or any where baby delivered.The helpers who help mother to deliver the baby they focus on that process heppen to be successfully cause the life& death of mom and baby involved them on that moment while they are hands they use to praying heartly in order to keep mom alive and well while the baby's arrive the moment baby arrival use to cry that is very important cause that tell them that baby is alive if this not heppening they force it to be heppen by that I mean crying is starting gear of everything.”
― Nozipho N.Maphumulo

“this story…seems only good for the breaking of one’s heart. Can you not add a little honey, to sweeten it for our ears?”
― Brock Meier, The Stone Cutter: A novel of Petra In Ancient Arabia

“Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, society needs cultural diversity to grow new possibilities. Monoculture deadens our collective potential. (Favianna Rodriguez, Harnessing Cultural Power)”
― Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

“In the theatre's dark, he weighs up what to do out of love. There have been enough divergences so far for him to believe that Sophia's play is a self-contained thing that may only tangentially concern him.”
― Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite