We are all storytellers, from our first garbled words of mud and slugs to our last struggle to shape the words I love you in the holy cave of our mouths. "How was school?" our mother asked, and we told a story, and "who are you?" our lovers asked, and we told a story... an ancient shape of something true, something that twists up through tragedy and confusion, something true in and of all of us, something that makes us occasionally, haltingly, holy... We are stories told in the brief light between great darknesses.
Brian Doyle
"Hearing a story awakens the mythic story living in each of us. It places us in a “mythic condition” that reconnects us to the core imagination and living story at the center of our soul."
Michael Meade
"I would ask you to remember only this one thing," said Badger. "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good story-tellers. Never forget these obligations."
Barry Lopez
Crow and Weasel
The story - from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been none that did not tell stories.
Ursula Le Guin
“Sometimes,” an elder in that story says, “a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
Barry Lopez
Crow and Weasel
The storyteller isn't wiser than his audience, but rather is able to evoke and remind the audience of the wisdom that is already within them. The storyteller doesn't create meaning, but rather creates an atmosphere in which meaning is revealed. Now, that is a positive, vibrant, and profound relationship between storyteller and audience, it seems to me.
Isumataq “the person who creates the environment in which wisdom reveals itself.”
Inuit words
“The greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings, our mysterious origins and our numinous destinies, and dissolve them both into one.”
Ben Okri
“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
To the Cree, stories are animate beings. One could tell the biography of a single Cree story (which would be a story in itself) just as one could tell the natural history of an animal. In this respect, one could ask, what do stories do when they are no longer told? Do they live in villages? Some Cree say they do. Do they tell each other to each other? Some Cree say this is true as well. Certainly stories live out in the world, looking for episodes to add to themselves….A symbiotic relationship exists. If people nourish a story properly, it tells them useful things about life.
Howard Norman
The Wishing Bone Cycle
“The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.”
Martin Shaw