Henning Mankell Quotes

To survive, you must tell stories.

Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

A good story never dies.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

Death steals everything except our stories.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

Storytelling is the important thing.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.