Pablo Neruda Quotes

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

Before there were any sort of 'recordings' there was performance. If we are devolved back to the Stone Age tomorrow, there will be performance.

I was brought up feeling that art is a very important part of one's life. It's something that I not only enjoy, it's something I can share with others.

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

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

Cooking is one of those things that is universal to people. And any time you can teach somebody a way to connect with all people, there's so much joy in it. And it is always going to be exciting.

Tap dancing is like... it's equivalent to music, not only for the African American community, but also for the world. Tap dancing is like language; it's like air: it's like everything else that we need in order to survive. I'm blessed and honored to be knowledgeable of the art form and to be a part of the art form.

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

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

The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

Art takes different forms... But it represents something that is basic in all of us-our history.

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

Name me a society that doesn't love barbeque. It doesn't exist. Mankind is barbeque celebration.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.