Demis Roussos Quotes

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

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

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

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.

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.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

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

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

History: Gossip well told.

I find all folklore challenging, and I never cease to be grateful that I became a professional folklorist.

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

The telling room is, in Spanish, known as 'el contador.'

Folk music - and what people are now perceiving as being folk music - is music that's quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they're new. They sound like they've been sung by different people for years.

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

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.