Wayne Grady Quotes

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

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

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

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.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.

I love telling stories. I think of myself as a storyteller, and I don't feel bound by being just a singer or an actress. First, I'm a storyteller, and history is stories - the most compelling stories. There is a lot you can find out about yourself through knowing about history. I have always been attracted to things that are old. I have just always found such things interesting and compelling.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out. That's why I'm always hoping society never collapses because the first ones to go will be entertainers.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

History is merely gossip.

History breaks down in images not into stories.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.