Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

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.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

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

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.

Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?

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.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.