George C. Wolfe 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 hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

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

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

To record is a process against forgetting. I do interviews because it's what I've been doing every day for a few hours since I was a kid. I've always talked to artists.

My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.'

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

History shows us that the songs - the myth, the experience and the emotion - live longer the less you explain.

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 write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.

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.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

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.

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.

The inhabitants are hardly barbarous, they have a ...marvelous faculty for remembering places, and for describing them to one another. They ...can recall things that a White could not rehearse without writing