Arthur Machen Quotes

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

All the truth in the world is held in stories.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

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

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

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.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

There are some people who believe that these are not real stories with real people, but they actually are.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

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.

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.

Fairly tales are myths, and myths are only myths because there's a grain of truth in them.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

History is merely gossip.

People need stories; they want stories. They always will.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

I come from a family of storytellers.

I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality - scientific or historical reality - in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That's how I got interested in it.

George Clinton is the best storyteller in the world.