Charles de Lint Quotes

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

It's important for us to tell our stories.

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

We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.

We're all connected, related, part of one another's lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad.

We are the storytelling animal.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

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.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

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

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

It's good to pass on stories.

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.

When you see a Sudanese walking on the street, there is a story.