Quotes About Telling Our Stories

#1. In telling our stories, we have to give up part of our imagination, because if I ever told my daughter about this night, I would have to choose the details to tell it, limit the possibilities.

Daniel Chacon

#2. The point of telling our stories, even if only to ourselves, is to help us resurrect the parts we have buried. When we unearth them, even if it's difficult, we can integrate them into our sense of who we are. Often in our buried self our true power lies.

Helen LaKelly Hunt

#3. I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Natalie Goldberg

#4. Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other ... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.

Mark Nepo

#5. Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough ... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy.

James Carroll

#6. Our stories arise from our hearts and our souls. In this sense, telling our stories becomes a sacred gesture, opening a clear way to that deep, ecstatic center where we are most uniquely our selves, individual and unique, and yet are ourselves, joined together at the heart.

Susan Wittig Albert

#7. In constructing our narratives, we identify which particular events or experiences were formative or transformative. In telling our stories, we also claim some authority over our own experiences and their meanings.

Peg O'Connor

#8. I needed a piece of a story, something real and full of life and blood and breath and heartache, something that someone had lived through, a piece of wisdom earned the hard way. That's why telling our stories is so important.

Shauna Niequist

#9. The same basic tools we've used for thousands of years to connect with people, to draw them in and to hold their attention will always work, even if we're telling our stories 140 characters at a time.

Shawn Amos

#10. Tonight is the night of telling our stories. You tell three and I four.

Avijeet Das

#11. I'm great at telling stories with the kids. I do all my different accents. We make our own stories up all the time, the four of us, me and Hannah and the kids.

Stephen Graham

#12. In these story telling moments we equip our children, with crucial solution tools for life. To deprive them of these necessary teachable moments is like denying a carpenter the tools of his trade.

Drexel Deal

#13. Women don't have to be defined by others. We have the power to define ourselves: by telling our own stories, in our own words, with our own voices.

Sarah Kay

#14. I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Donald Miller

#15. Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.

Stanley Kunitz

#16. I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.

Alejandro Zambra

#17. We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves...But we can control those stories...I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them

Dan Chaon

#18. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

Brene Brown

#19. That is how we always keep our beloved dead alive, isn't it? By telling stories about them; true stories.

James D. Bradley

#20. Because the new the stories we tell, the art we make, the rockets we build, will influence the future that shapes our present.

Natasha Tsakos

#21. I need to keep my story count high. I'm trying to get as many stories in my hour as is humanly possible. We're telling more stories in our hour than any national newscast has in the history of this business, I think.

Shepard Smith

#22. Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

Camilla Lackberg

#23. She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

Ally Condie

#24. We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we're doing, if we're selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.

Tennessee Williams

#25. When I was in my early twenties, my mom started repeating things, asking the same questions, telling the same stories. It was like, 'Oh, God, this is not right.' When I was 25, my brother and I finally told our dad we had to take her to the doctor.

Lauren Miller

#26. Marvel does a fantastic job about bringing human stories - because you're telling big stories with a heart at the centre of it - and that's what connects all of the characters to our audience members.

Mike Colter

#27. Stories are our attempts to share our values & beliefs with the hopes that we may attract those who believe what we believe. This is the basis of forming a trusting relationship. Story telling, therefor, is only worthwhile when it tells what you stand for, not what you do.

Simon Sinek

#28. Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.

Nick Flynn

#29. All the stories we've been telling about the presence of an evil power in the world, all the dark characters that have sent chills down our spines and given us restless nights - they are spoken to us as warnings.
There is evil cast around us ... there is an evil force in this world.

John Eldredge

#30. We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.

Mani S. Sivasubramanian

#31. Wrestling is a performance. Its entertainment, we [wrestlers] tell stories. We make our fans happy by telling stories but the long and short of it its pretty much the same thing as acting.

John Cena

#32. I associate times with certain music. It still is that for me. It's telling the story of our lives.

James Hetfield

#33. Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

George Saunders

#34. Most writers stick to what they know. The black experience is our experience, so it's not that challenging for us. That's why sometimes you'll see writers that start off telling black stories, but later branch out into other material. People say they "sell out." No, they evolve as writers.

Lena Waithe

#35. In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#36. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. But if we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us- we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.

Stephen Grosz

#37. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Alice Munro

#38. Walking, talking, reading, drawing, praying, telling stories: the nourishment is there, as close as our own breath. We only have to pause a moment, notice, and enjoy.

Christian McEwen

#39. We need art. We've been telling stories since the beginning. As human beings, we need it for our survival.

Lili Taylor

#40. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

Flemming Rose

#41. By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#42. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what's going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These

Charles Duhigg

#43. Cursing, telling smutty stories, smearing the good name of another, and referring irreverently to God and the Scriptures may be considered as coming under the expression corrupt speech. Our speech is to be clean, pure, and wholesome.

Billy Graham

#44. When women get together, they tell stories. This is how it has always been. Telling stories is our way of saying who we are, where we have come from, what we know, and where we might be headed.

Jalaja Bonheim

#45. I'm a New Zealand actor, and I really want to be doing our stuff here, and our stuff includes plays from overseas. In terms of survival, maybe I should have taken a shot elsewhere at some point, but it gets back to the same theme - we should have our own people telling our own stories.

Peter Hambleton

#46. Whatever kind of story you're telling, whether it's a genre piece for a comic book or whatever it is, it has importance because it's all a metaphor for the existence of our being.

Seth Gabel

#47. I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

Oprah Winfrey

#48. ...he starts telling them about our day, embellishing it so that it almost sounds fun. It's how all good travel stories are born. Nightmares spun into punch lines.

Gayle Forman

#49. I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Joyce Carol Oates

#50. We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

Niall Williams

#51. We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.

Bryant Gumbel

#52. Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.

John Connolly

#53. I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.

Carrie Ryan

#54. When we, any of us who have been transformed by Christ, tell our own stories, we're telling the story of who God is.

Shauna Niequist

#55. - 'This is not the way our story ends. You know this'
- 'Stories do not end.'
- 'Ah, you are right, but you are also wrong. They end and they begin every moment. It is all about when you stop the telling.

Patrick Ness

#56. But most of our time was spent telling stories. We had so little in common that stories were all that we could share.

Patrick Rothfuss

#57. The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

Annette Simmons

#58. When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.

Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.

Rick Revelle

#59. Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.

LZ Granderson

#60. Gaza Writes Back' provides conclusive evidence that telling stories is an act of life, that telling stories is resistance, and that telling stories shapes our memories.

Refaat Alareer

#61. I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.

Chuck Palahniuk