Family Narratives Quotes

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who's living.

The son has always felt like he was a footnote in one of the stories the father tells. The father is an amazing storyteller and one of the tales that he tells is how he met his wife.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

In 2010, my kids came home telling these ridiculous stories about me they heard from school. I realized my kids didn't know my story, and they were hearing it from the goofballs at school.

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within 'Roots' is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

Growing up with three brothers and three sisters, I was the storyteller of the family... what my mother called 'The Liar.'

I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.

In the case of 'The Book Thief,' my research was hearing the stories of my parents when I was a child. But I started changing the stories when I began moulding the book.

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?

My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.

Every articulate family ... generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child.

With family dramas, it's hard to keep those stories alive.

People come up to us and ask how we knew so much about their own family... I'm talking about people from faraway places, too. I get people from Turkey and Chile coming up to me and saying I wrote about their family.