Stephen Michael Stirling Quotes

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

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

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.

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

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

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.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

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.

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.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

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

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.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

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

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

I find all folklore challenging, and I never cease to be grateful that I became a professional folklorist.

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

We are the storytelling animal.

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

Storytelling is essentially what we do.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

When you tell a story you automatically talk about traditions, but they're never separate from the people, the human implications. You're talking about your connections as a human being.