Lynda Barry Quotes

The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

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.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

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

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

In 1893, Miss M. Roalfe Cox brought together, in a volume of the Folk-Lore Society, no less than 345 variants of 'Cinderella' and kindred stories showing how widespread this particular formula was throughout Europe and how substantially identical the various incidents as reproduced in each particular country.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

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.

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

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.