Sayed Kashua Quotes

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

I believe that everyone has a story, and it is important that we encourage all students to tell theirs.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

It's good to pass on stories.

My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that.

My grandparents told endless stories about the town they were from. It became an almost mythic place.

I come from a family of storytellers.

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

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

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

I want to tell stories of impact.

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 I've ever done since I was 17 is tell stories. You know, I'm a storyteller. And that's what I'm going to keep on doing, especially now, kind of embracing and making sure that we tell immigration.

I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.

My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

Families always stay the same, but they always provide more stories.

I grew up in a family where the love of stories is very strong. And there's also a love of performance. I think one reason stories were so important in my family was that we moved around a lot.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

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.