Jill Lepore Quotes

Folktales are real.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

History: Gossip well told.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.

All history was at first oral.

The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

If the legends fall silent, who will teach the children of our ways?

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.