Oral Traditions Quotes

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.

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.

Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.

A residence of many years in Yorkshire, and an inveterate habit of collecting all kinds of odd and out-of-the-way information concerning men and matters, furnished me, when I left Yorkshire in 1872, with a large amount of material, collected in that county, relating to its eccentric children.

That's all that really matters in the end. Stories.

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns -- Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

I love anything to do with history.

The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.

History breaks down in images not into stories.

Oral musical traditions are rooted in assured and scrupulous faith.

The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.

Her, cheer up. Zoey's grandma didn't say the Raven Mockers actually ate people. She said they just picked them up with their humongous beaks and threw them against a wall or whatever over and over again until every bone in their body was broken." - Aphrodite LaFonte

But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

Mediaeval mythology, rich and gorgeous, is a compound like Corinthian brass, into which many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes.

Legends are often destroyed by those in need of its stuff.

Stories are the wildest things of all. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

I'm interested in history.

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.