Home > Topic > a storyteller
1 " I am a storyteller and experience the bliss of writing. "
― Amy Leigh Mercree , Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life
2 " Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks. "
― Jane Yolen
3 " Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You have a very important job--one of the most important. Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings--and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know they are not alone. You must make people understand that we are all the same. "
― , The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator
4 " What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look." -Leah said—to Nadine, although she was looking at Marjorie (pg 138) "
5 " You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. " Something beautiful and full of monsters." “Beautiful and full of monsters?" “All the best stories are. "
6 " I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories. "
― Peter Ferry , Travel Writing
7 " I've been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept." Dear Deb" I didn't know how it felt to have cancer, but I knew about fear." Dear Deb" Two people have tried to kill me. The first person was my mother." Dear Deb" I used to believe there were big miracles and little miracles. But, I'm not so sure God measures miracles." Dear Deb" I was raised to believe forgiveness was a gift I was supposed to give the person who hurt me, but that felt like giving a bully an ice cream cone after he pushed me down on the playground." Dear Deb" Miracles are one of God's ways of getting our attention. I know he got mine. It's a miracle I'm here." Dear Deb "
8 " Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing! "
― Richelle E. Goodrich
9 " By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale. "
― Rabih Alameddine , The Hakawati
10 " The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. "
― Brandon Sanderson , The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1)
11 " You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't. "
― Sandra Dallas
12 " If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth? "
― Lloyd Alexander , The Arkadians
13 " I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again. "
― Ripley Patton
14 " Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don’t appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind. "
― King Samuel Benson
15 " I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school. "
