Quotes…
A potpourri of quotes you might find inspirational, informational and/or enjoyable…On storytelling, story, imagination, boundary-crossing, storytellers, personal stories, digital dilemmas and delights…and more…
STORYTELLING
“The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.” – Anthony de Mello
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories” – Ursula LeGuin
“Humans only really learn from each other by storytelling. We didn’t evolve to memorize things. We evolved to hear each other’s stories and feel them in our heart. Your life is the most powerful story you can tell.” – Martha Beck
“Storytelling thrives on imagination. Images touch the heart and become sensations, sensations trigger memories, memories create meaning and meaning leads to listener action.” – Diane F. Wyzga
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” – Hannah Arendt
STORY
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten” – G.K. Chesterton
“Whilst ‘thou shalt not’ may reach the head, it takes ‘once upon a time’ to reach the heart” – Philip Pullman
“Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic” – Jim Trelease
“The story 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 no societies that did not tell stories.” – Ursula K. LeGuin
“Story allows us to make information productive. Without Story, information is nothing but a lot of bricks lying about waiting for someone to make constructive use of them.” – Aidan Chambers
IMAGINATION
“When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato
“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” – William Blake
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” – Philip José Farmer
BRIDGING / BOUNDARY-CROSSING / CONNECTING
“I believe in the democracy of storytelling; I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries” – Colum McCann
“All people, black, white, brown, red, and yellow, are like each other when they tell stories.” – Andrew Lang, preface to The Brown Fairy Book, 1904
STORYTELLERS
“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.” – Red Adair
PERSONAL STORIES
“By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do ‘official’ narratives.” – Sue Austin
DIGITAL DILEMMAS, DIGRESSIONS, DISAGREEMENTS AND DELIGHTS…
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” – Albert Einstein
UNCATEGORIZED OTHER QUOTES I LIKE…
“Australian Aborigines say that the big stories – the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life – are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.” – Robert Moss
“Any explanation of a work of art must be found in it, not taken to it. As a film teacher, I was always being told by students that a film by David Lynch, say, or Warner Herzog, was ‘a retelling of the life of Christ, say, or “Moby Dick.”’ My standard reply was: Maybe it’s simply the telling of itself.” – Roger Ebert
“Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.” – a turn of the century Polish-French artist known best as Balthus