storytelling.org

Cultivating storytelling as art, storytellers as artists, and stories as the roots of both.

Stories Enliven Spirits
Stories Shape Culture
Stories Bond Communities
    • "Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's Re-story." -Francesca Lia Block, Author
    • "Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story." -Isak Dinesen
    • "Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story." -Isak Dinesen
    • "I like Cinderella, I really do. She has a good work ethic. I appreciate a good, hard-working gal. And she likes shoes. The fairy tale is all about the shoe at the end, and I'm a big shoe girl." -Amy Adams
    • "Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution - more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to." -Lisa Cron, Author
    • "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." -Maya Angelou, Author
    • "Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize." -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Author
    • "That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again." -Walt Disney
    • "Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity." -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Author
    • "It's not magic that takes us into another world - it's storytelling." -Val McDermid, Author
    • "Story is the song line of a person's life. We need to sing it and we need someone to hear the singing. Story told. Story heard. Story written. Story read creates the web of life in words." -Christina Baldwin, Author
    • "There is no greater power on earth than story." -Libba Bray, Author
    • "Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free." -Francesca Lia Block, Author
    • "Storytelling is the oldest form of education." -Terry Tempest Williams, Author
    • "The universe is made of stories not of atoms." -Muriel Rukeyser, Poet
    • "Storytelling is the essential human activity." -Timothy O'Brien, Author
    • "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you." -Maya Angelou, Author
    • "Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." -Hannah Arendt
    • "To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.” -Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pronography
    • "We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.” -G.K. Chesterton
    • "What kind of people we become depends crucially on the stories we are nurtured on." -Nigeria Chinweizu
    • "In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected." -Charles Dickens, British Novelist (1812-1870)
    • "The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in." -Harold Goddard
    • "Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life." -Johann Christoph, Friederich v. Schiller, German Poet (1759-1805)
    • "I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered." -Joan Gould
    • "Narrative is a compulsion, the quickest bait on the sharpest hook. The first taste of it makes you desperate for the rest, the end, the place where the circle swallows its tail." -Amanda Henry
    • "Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies, its queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious, its friendly fées.” -Andrew Lang, The Rose Fairy Book
    • "In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle." -Ursula K. Le Guin
    • "If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” -Barry Lopes, In Crow and Weasel
    • "Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.” -Seanan McGuire, Indexing
    • "The term 'narrative' is often confused with the term “plot,” but they're not the same thing. If I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died, that's not narrative; that's plot. But, if I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of a broken heart, that's narrative." -Vladimir Nabakov
    • "We have the art of story-telling in order not to die of life." -Nietzsche
    • "The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.” -Philip Pullman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
    • "Say it, say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." -Muriel Rukeyser
    • "Fairy tales are rife with transformation — from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks.” -Marie Rutkoski, The Nature of Cinderella
    • "Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.”-Anne Sexton, Transformations
    • "If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life." -Siberian Elder
    • "The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
    • "The Dreamer awakesThe shadow goes byThe tale I have told you,That tale is a lie.
      But listen to me,Bright maiden, proud youthThe tale is a lie;What it tells is the truth.”-Traditional Folktale Ending
    • "The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.” -Marina Warner, Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
    • "Tell me a story of deep delight." -Robert Penn Warren
    • "God made man because he loves stories." -Elie Wiesel
    • "You don’t decide to tell a story, the story decides that you will tell it." -Gad Yaacobi
    • "Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest possesses the power to change lives and alter destinies.” -Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World
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Illinois Storytelling, Inc. is partially funded by the Oak Park Area Arts Council in partnership with the Village of Oak Park, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.