Wallace Stegner Quotes

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

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.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

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

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

Folktales are real.

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

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.

Passed down from generation to generation, storytelling was an art in my family.

From the beginning of time, we've told stories, Shamans and Medicine People, and not to be pompous about it, but I feel like that is the lineage I take down and where I come from. There is magic to storytelling.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Mythology is a vast body of knowledge that has not been tapped.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

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

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

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

Stories always seem to get better with age.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.