Kate Forsyth Quotes

In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

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.

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

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

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.

A good story never dies.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

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 is the oldest form of education.

Storytelling is the important thing.

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

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

Stories always seem to get better with age.