Maria Konnikova Quotes

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

We are the storytelling animal.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

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

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

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

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

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

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.

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 grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

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

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

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