Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.

There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our 'Camelot' - who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

So here is my story, may it bring Some smiles and a tear or so, It happened once upon a time, Far away, and long ago, Outside the night wind keens and wails, Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!

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.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

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.

The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

Storytelling, a primitive art, is as old as the beginning of mankind. People want to receive what's out there in the form of stories, not just facts, opinion, analysis.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

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.

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.