Ancestral Tales Quotes

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho.

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.

I've always liked telling stories. That probably came from my dad, who definitely had the gift of gab and who wove a kind of personal folklore about his youth - stories full of adventure and ghosts and wild antics.

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.

I come from a family of storytellers. My grandmother was great at telling stories, and my mother was an amazing storyteller.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

I come from a family of storytellers.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

As a child my grandmother used to tell us stories about the dead and the mystical.

In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.

Death steals everything except our stories.

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

I love writing family stories.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

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.

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.