The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: storytelling, writing

Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.

storytelling, writing

Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadors of the past, who hid their messages in poems, songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose [ … ] It was by telling stories that I would save myself.

storytelling, writing

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode…It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

storytelling, writing

The heart is a repository of emotions–real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future–and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell.

storytelling, writing

Aleksandar Hemon

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination–and therefore fiction–is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

storytelling, writing

Robert William Case

These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling of the old stories…We are grounded in its power. It is our connection to each other and to the larger universe.

storytelling, writing

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

storytelling, writing

My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people…. I was fired from Maclean’s after I wrote a piece called ‘Let’s Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex’. Now I’m the ‘beloved author,’ the ‘beloved historian of Canada,’ an icon. I get standing ovations…. I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]

storytelling, writing

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.

storytelling, writing

Anyway, it’s a pretty good story,” I said. “You have to admit.””Yeah?” He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. “You can have it. I’m giving it to you. After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?””When the earth’s shadow falls across the Moon.””Very significant. I’m sure it’s a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.””Kind of trite.” I said.He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life–his, everyone’s–I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.

storytelling, writing

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.

storytelling, writing

Elvira Woodruff

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .

storytelling, writing