Quotes About Oral Tradition

#1. Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.

Harold Innis

#2. I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.

Mat Johnson

#3. My love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with [my] mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women.

Lucrecia Martel

#4. He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

David Cronenberg

#5. People get strange about whether you've written your own songs, which seems really stupid considering that, especially in Country Music, it's about oral tradition and passing things on and the songs weren't meant to be played by one person and then forgotten.

Neko Case

#6. There's a saying in the oral tradition of storytelling that when you tell a story, when you give out a story, it is no longer yours; it belongs to everyone who encounters it and everyone who takes it in.

Ishmael Beah

#7. Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Steven Pinker

#8. these kind of features are strong indicators of a strong oral tradition, that the writing was more an aid of what people have already memorized, that you went to the text already knowing what it should say.

Keith E. Small

#9. The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

P.L. Travers

#10. I come out of a strong oral tradition in the South,

Horton Foote

#11. Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

John Trudell

#12. Rae Chorze-Fwaz has preserved and passed on their secret meditation techniques in oral tradition from the time of Atlantis until he present day.

Frederick Lenz

#13. Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.

Nana Awere Damoah

#14. I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller,
the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-
as a storyteller. A good storyteller.

Louis L'Amour

#15. People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

Campbell McGrath

#16. The task of understanding a culture built on the oral tradition is impossible to students steeped in the written tradition. p.55

Harold A. Innis

#17. I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.

Louis L'Amour

#18. Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

N. Scott Momaday

#19. There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#20. Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

Alice McDermott

#21. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

Harold Innis

#22. I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Saul Williams

#23. I believe it is important to preserve dialects as well as the regional accents of an area. Oral tradition is still necessary and by using dialectal WORDS as the mortar, we can connect future generations with their heritage.

Patricia H. Graham

#24. I don't come out of an oral tradition, I come out of silence.

Colm Toibin

#25. Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

Joseph Jacobs

#26. My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen ... my mother and three or four of her friends ... told stories ... with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.

Paule Marshall

#27. Rap comes from the oral tradition. The oral tradition gives voice to those who would've otherwise been voiceless.

Benjamin Zephaniah

#28. I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

Robert Fitzgerald

#29. Oral musical traditions are rooted in assured and scrupulous faith.

Franz Liszt

#30. I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

Khaled Hosseini

#31. I've always used the technique of the cuento. I am an oral storyteller, but now I do it on the printed page. I think if we were very wise we would use that same tradition in video cassettes, in movies, and on radio.

Rudolfo Anaya

#32. When an old person dies, a whole library disappears.

Simone Schwarz-Bart

#33. The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.

Alice Walker

#34. I wish I'd paid better attention. I didn't yet think of time as finite. I didn't fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind.

Jessica Maria Tuccelli

#35. ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive.

Marcel Proust

#36. This land has brought forth numerous children, favouring both the bad and the good ones. It is not the land that is responsible for the people's hardships, it is the people themselves. Pg.8

Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

#37. These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

Edwidge Danticat