Storytellers Quotes

Comedians are people who embarrass themselves in style. ~ A.D. Posey

It's plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we're literary Gypsies, all of us, and it's only recently that we're starting to realise we're not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I've always loved wild people. ~ Karl Wiggins

Writing is like breathing for my soul. ~ A.D. Posey

The best teachers are the best storytellers. ~ Frank Smith

Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called. ~ Nancy Mellon

A masterpiece does not unfurl its wings immediately. It takes time. It will fly when it is ready. ~ A.D. Posey

When life gives you a second chance, don't just run with it…fly. ~ A.D. Posey

Pour your heart onto the page. ~ A.D. Posey

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers. ~ Anne Lamott

Honestly, the essence of publishing hasn't changed. Since the days of the cave man carving stuff on the cave walls, people have wanted stories, and storytellers have wanted an audience. That is still the case. The changes are really a matter of format. ~ Susan Wiggs

I just always liked the company. The people who hung around her were amazing storytellers, whether it was actors or crew. They were just exciting people. And I knew that they were different when I would go see a friend or stay at someone else's house. It just wasn't as cool. So I always loved the theater, and that's where I started: at a theater up in Canada. ~ Kiefer Sutherland

George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again. ~ Walt Disney Company

Every painting tells a story. ~ A.D. Posey

M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories ~ Anne Carson

Fly with a kind heart, a light spirit, and a resilient soul. ~ A.D. Posey

I think our storytellers - our songwriters should be great storytellers, and they should be mountain climbers and explorers, because music is something that can cross all different borders. ~ Jason Mraz

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening. ~ Carmen Agra Deedy

Love writes without words. ~ A.D. Posey

You are your own magical elixir. Waste not one drop. ~ A.D. Posey

Look through the eyes of your highest self. What do you see? ~ A.D. Posey

This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words. ~ Christina Baldwin

Magicians and Mentalist predict the future because they create it. ~ Amit Kalantri

But the storytellers would never know that. Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn't have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from Windows like falling stars made a better tale. ~ Alwyn Hamilton

There's nothing like the gift of understanding. ~ A.D. Posey

I have the heart of an artist and the soul of a writer. ~ A.D. Posey

I'll tell you a secret.
Old storytellers never die.
They disappear into their own story. ~ Vera Nazarian

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters. ~ Kazimir Malevich

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience. ~ Dennis Quaid

We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

Yet the need for justifying the wealth and power of great corporations in the eyes of the people has never been greater. Why not hark back to Florence, Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam? The great corporations could devote wealth and energies to cleaning up, improving and adorning our cities. Each large corporation might adopt a city and vie with other corporations to see whose city shines brightest. In the center of each financial district there should be a large plaza in which periodically poets, singers, storytellers and artists of every sort would compete for rich prizes. The corporations should see it as their duty to spot and encourage talent, and celebrate greatness. There should be social intimacy between the powerful and the creative. ~ Eric Hoffer

A writer's breakthrough is a breakdown with a smile. ~ A.D. Posey

Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people. ~ Doris Lessing

Wherever you are, wherever you go, be sure to spread the light. ~ A.D. Posey

Write what speaks to your soul. ~ A.D. Posey

Look upon the world with wonder. ~ A.D. Posey

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death. ~ George Pelecanos

In the end, you have to make love to your story and see what happens. ~ A.D. Posey

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight.

"I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land.

"The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero."

"The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people ~ Ben Okri

Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going. ~ Bryce Courtenay

Writers are storytellers. So are readers. ~ Oliver North

Because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad people will win. ~ Christiane Amanpour

I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy. Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend. They will not be taken down - the Goddess is offended ... As a storyteller in the old tradition, you held an important place at the circle. Your position was fluid, not necessarily permanent, but it demanded that you respected the others witnessing your performance as much as they respected you. All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths. ~ Tori Amos

Take a deep breath. Inhale peace. Exhale happiness. ~ A.D. Posey

Storytellers tell stories, of course, but they aren't alone in doing so. The dawn tells a story; so does the sun as it arcs across the sky; so does the sunset. The seasons tell a complex story. The fall of an acorn and the growth of an oak tree tell a story. A farmer's plow and the furrows in a field tell a story as well. Even the waves crashing on a beach tell a story. How easy to see, then, that an ax tells a story, too, at least while it hangs for a moment in the air just before descending onto your neck. That story is: Now you die. ~ Edward Myers

Humans are storytellers. It is our nature to make up stories, to interpret everything we perceive. Without awareness, we give our personal power to the story and the story writes itself. With awareness, we recover the control of our story. We see we are the authors and if we don't like our story, we change it. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore... ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic. ~ A.D. Posey

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. ~ Peter Handke

I am free to write: therefore, I am free to be. ~ A.D. Posey

I am not attempting to preserve culture, or record actual events or stories. Instead I bow my head in gratitude to those storytellers who have gone before and paved a way for me play in their stomping grounds. Doubtless those who want to be offended, will - allowing me to make them happy, too, which pleases me as much as it pleases them. ~ Patricia Briggs

Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things, they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own and in the end become the very truth… until the bubble bursts.("What after bowling alone?" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

We'd like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers. ~ Seth Godin

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning. ~ Joan D. Vinge

A single recipe holds countless stories. ~ A.D. Posey

Tonight, I'm certainly going to tell you a story, but 'tis a story with a difference because, unlike virtually every other tale I tell-in this case, I was there. And yet I know that although I was there, and I saw people who were real, they have since become somewhat imagined-because I now view them through my memory. That's something every human being does-but storytellers live by it. ~ Frank Delaney

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it. ~ David W. Orr

That's what we do, man, we're like storytellers. We tell you stories from the streets. Whether we did it before when we was young or we heard it from one of the homies telling us a tale of what he been through. It's all in having fun and creating a movie like vibe to tell a tale from the streets. ~ Kurupt

There's always a reason to look up. ~ A.D. Posey

A defeated nation is always explaining itself. That's why the best storytellers are always from vanquished nations. ~ Mark Richard

Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience. ~ BatWhaleDragon

They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins. ~ Ransom Riggs

Sometimes you're the protagonist and someone else is the hero. ~ A.D. Posey

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity. ~ Halldor Laxness

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence. ~ Flannery O'Connor

If you don't humiliate yourself, you don't live. ~ A.D. Posey

Dance when the sun comes up. ~ A.D. Posey

Allow your mood to be sweet and your day will be sweet too. ~ A.D. Posey

A great story is impossible to forget. ~ A.D. Posey

In life, be a kid in a candy store. ~ A.D. Posey

All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV. ~ David Mixner

Every work of art tells a story. ~ A.D. Posey

A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her. ~ Glen Duncan

How you feel after watching something indicates not what you watched but where you are at. ~ A.D. Posey

Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced. ~ Sarah Wayne Callies

Listen when your heart speaks. ~ A.D. Posey

The writer's craft, explained!

I have stood on the shores of imagination, gazing at a sea of dreams.
It is a lonely place, for not many can stand on that shifting sand and call it home.
I can see others who also weave a web of dreams and will share them.
We are called storytellers and we alone have that gift that feed the needs of the many.
We are a strange family, united in our separate talents and bonded by our willingness to share.
The price we pay, is a dependence on others, reaching out to listen to our stories.
WE must never forget our need for the herd or they will forget us!
There is no savage punishment for such as we, than to be easily forgotten!
This is our greatest fear and all of us share that terror.
So write brothers and sisters, write and bare your souls without fear.
If you are good enough, they will listen and they will remember you.
Its all we can ask! ~ Barry Woodham

All answers to life's key questions are found within. ~ A.D. Posey

Be careful what you say and do around a writer; your words and actions may become material. ~ A.D. Posey

If everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world. If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. ~ Gerald Hausman

Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers. I wanted to watch what my actors were doing and how they were telling the story. ~ Paul Bettany

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none. ~ Julie Andrews

I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning - that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere. The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow, that life itself is like a story ... it makes us listen to the storyteller with great intensity because in this way all his stories are about us and because it is always possible that he may give us some clue as to what the meaning of our lives is. ~ Frederick Buechner

In Ireland every place you visit and every person you meet has a story. And they love to tell you their stories. Everyone is interested in everything; in a land of storytellers, you will never be bored. ~ Maeve Binchy

I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart. ~ Kimberly Willis Holt

Accept nothing. Challenge everything. ~ A.D. Posey

This goes out to all the Rag Tags and the negative shits and anyone else who resents people who have the courage to follow their dreams, and not only that but to show their dreams to somebody else.

The planet needs more writers, artists and musicians. More tattooed storytellers.

Why so many people seem to resent the storyteller is beyond me. We're not raging against the machine, but we do want the opportunity to show our art to as many people as possible. What's so wrong with that?

And believe it or not, we won't go away. ~ Karl Wiggins

I spoke with the crows before leaving for Los Angeles. They were the resident storytellers whose strident and insistent voices added the necessary dissonance for color. They had cousins in California, and gave me their names and addresses, told me to look them up. They warned me, too, what they had heard about attitude there. And they were right. Attitude was thick, hung from the would-be's and has-beens and think-they-ares, so thick that I figured it was the major source of the smog. ~ Joy Harjo

Fear is the enemy of success. ~ A.D. Posey

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 toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is 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 toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. ~ John Gardner

Don't let the poison of the past spoil a fruitful future. ~ A.D. Posey

To strive in life; we must either read or write a story. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Brands should think of themselves not as storytellers but storybuilders. We plant seeds of content and let our community build on it. ~ Amy Pascal

I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were. ~ George Clooney

There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar. ~ John Steinbeck

Laughter lights up the darkness. ~ A.D. Posey

Screenwriting is like poker; in the end, you have to go all in. ~ A.D. Posey

Love is the universal language. ~ A.D. Posey

Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger? ~ Orson Scott Card