Baker's Dozen-Storytelling Quotes

Add your favorite storytelling quote as a "comment".

1. Whoever wants to tell a variety of stories
Ought to have a variety of beginnings.
---Marie de France

2. What I have is a story---laugh if you want to but as I tell the story it will begin to happen.
----Leslie Marmon

3. The universe is made of stories not of atoms.
----Muriel Rukeser

4. All the stories have been told long ago. Your job is retelling. relighting.
---Pam Gem

5. I believe stories have this power—they enter us, they transport us, they change things inside us so invisibly so minutely that sometimes we are not even aware that we come out of a great book as a different person from the person we were when we began reading it.
---Julie Alvarez

6. We all hunger for stories. Stories give form to our desires, feelings and goals, molding how we view just about everything---from our own bodies to what is sacred or profane, good or bad, possible or impossible. Stories give us figures to emulate, imitate, admire or abhor. And it is from the stories we are told that we turn unconsciously fashion our own live scripts.
---Sally Gearhart

7. Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
---C. S. Lewis

8. The first law of storytelling. … Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.
---Mrs. Humphrey Ward

9. That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
---Alice Munro

10. “The tale is often wiser than the teller.”
---Susan Fletcher
(as Marjan, in Shadow Spinner)

11. “Stories tell us of what we already knew and forgot, and remind us of what we haven’t yet imagined.”
---Anne Watson

12. “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

13. One shoe can change your life.
---Cinderella

14.  "If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be geniuses, read them more fairy tales."---Albert Einstein

15.

I wish for a story that speaks to me.

I wish for that connection of eye to eye, sound to ear, heart to heart.

I wish for the continuing passing down of the oral tradition of culture, history, teaching, and entertainment.

I wish to be heard and not be a text.

by Sandy Rothman

16.  "Never let truth stand in the way of a good story." ---Mark Twain