Narrative Empowerment Quotes

In lots of ways, I've been trying to tell stories this way since I started writing plays: a female-centered story with queer, Latinx gaze.

When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.

There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.

If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history.

As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.

Fundamentally, one of the things I tend to migrate toward when I'm working is a story about people whose stories aren't told in theater.

When we deny our stories, They define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.

There's a lack of diversity amongst executives in the position of greenlighting a film who feel that their stories are being told. If there's a diversity at the executive level, then we'll have diversity of the storytelling process.

Anyone, any type of story, it doesn't have to be a crime victim, you don't have to let yourself be food for the media.

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.

While I am a huge proponent of us as Africans telling our own stories and countering the negative stereotypes out there since no one else will, I am also cognizant of the power that the mainstream Western media still has on shaping perceptions of the continent.

I think diversity has to happen on a storytelling level, not just on a casting level.

As I've written more, and as other Indian American voices have grown around me, I strive harder to find experiences that are unique yet a meaningful and resonant part of the American story.

As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.

A lot of the time, because we don't have many Latinx scenarios on the landscape, not just in television or film and other media, we haven't gotten the chance to tell our story from our point of view.

For me, as an activist and a storyteller, I'm very centered in ensuring that we show the complicatedness of the human experience that happens to be rooted in my community's trans experiences.

We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.

The kids you turn your backs on when you take away their stories are the ones who lose, as well as you as a community of adults who may appear to fear their truths.

Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It's not a monolog. Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership. Only when the listener(s) own the tellers' story and make it theirs, will they virally market it.

I started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

The strength of 'The Gift' is that the people featured and their stories are given the space to speak for themselves.

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.