Alan Dundes Quotes

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

Culture is the way for a country to know itself.

National identity does not figure in the Tamil way of thinking.

There are multiple levels of 'we' and multiple groups that can constitute this idea of who we are. We need to be aware of who we are including and excluding.

I don't really know what feeling Japanese or Haitian or American is supposed to feel like. I just feel like me.

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn't going to change just because we've gone electronic. What is changing is that now we're allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.

By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the 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.

The role of culture is that it's the form through which we as a society reflect on who we are, where we've been, where we hope to be.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.

I've never understood people who say they're not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he's not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?