Anthony Shadid Quotes

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.

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.

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 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 like making films about old people because they are repositories of amazing stories that they tell well. And they're incredibly good telly.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

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

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.

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 used to love to sit and listen to the old people talk about yesterday. There's a lot of good information there.

Passed down from generation to generation, storytelling was an art in my family.

The stories in 'Jim the Boy' are either made up or appropriated from some source other than my family. But the idea of a family telling stories to the kid, often to impart some kind of lesson, that's very familiar, and that's the way that I grew up.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family's history and culture.

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.

I always say that in any roomful of people, I could hive a novel out of any one person's family or life story.

All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.

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.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

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.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.