Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

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

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.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

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

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.

I grew up in a family where the love of stories is very strong. And there's also a love of performance. I think one reason stories were so important in my family was that we moved around a lot.

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

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

Our children's children will hear a good story.

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.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

It's good to pass on stories.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

It's important to tell stories, and it's a worthwhile thing to do.

I think it is so important to pass down knowledge and information to younger generations.

I think, culturally, stories are important, whether it be cinema, whether it be by word of mouth - which I don't even know if we do anymore, as it all seems to be social media.

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

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

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.

Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. After the listening you become accountable for the sacred knowledge that has been shared.