“A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world.”
“My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn t reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn t need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.”
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”
“Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That s re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.”
“Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.”
“A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It s phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.”
“A narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are part. You are real and you are shadow. “Storyteller” and at the same time “character”. It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.”
“Stories cannot exist without a storyteller.”
“I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle in a new pattern, a new way of being. It is a tradition that believes that the story speaks to the soul, not the ego... to the heart, not the head. In todays world , we yearn so to understand , to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells. So I do not offer interpretation. What I offer is to tell the story again, and again... on and on, if need be - until the ego has stepped aside and the soul can hear. I trust that the life of the story continues long after I have gone, if the listener can step aside and be taken up and in, to a world where words speak not to the mind, but to the soul. I invite you to trust it too.”
“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.”
“Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times. ”
“The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.”
“The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.”
“The secret of all new and innovated animation is to think outside the box and explore new frontiers of idea and expression.”
“There were no doubts. My new friends obviously ‘collected’ men from different countries. I realized that therein lies their revenge on their errant husbands.”
“The arrows in the glasses disappeared. I stopped on the embankment. My eyes were filled with tears. I wiped my tears with a white handkerchief and threw it into the Rhine. The handkerchief was carried away as was my last hope for peace . . .”
“We believe in what we want to believe. I recently read a book about autosuggestion and decided to test it....”