Joe's Page

What'd Ya Say?

Joe Healy collected qoutes about stories and storytelling. He put those quotes into an occasional Works In Progress feature called "What'd Ya Say?" Here are some of those quotes.

Dimensions of human nature are key elements of a good story. Asking questions is a built-in feature of human nature. Good stories respond to those questions. One generation’s answers can become another’s tradition. Both teachers of creative writing and instructors in journalism tell students their readers want to know Who...What...When...Where...How...Why? The way reporters or storytellers link those elements determines whether the result is a routine news item or a good human interest story.
—Joe Healy

As soon as our young can comprehend our words, we begin to tell them stories, and the hope we harbor for our elders is that we will be able to hear their full story before they go.
—Harvey Cox, Seduction of the Spirit

Much of the power of storytelling comes from its helping us see the commonness of human experience, the commonness of our painful experiences, the commonness of our good experiences. And while I want my stories to be entertaining, beyond that, I want them to pull the listeners inside so they can identify with the common experiences. Through this process, the story will remain with them personally - and forever...
—Donald Davis, Homespun

Dear Abby,
Apropos complaints from wives and other relatives who are obliged to listen to stories told by some of us oldsters, may I come to the defense of some of my fellow storytellers with the following:
I once heard a very entertaining gentleman who was up in years say, "Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one." There is no reason why a good story should not be enjoyed more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be in the world if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven, Tchaikovsky,or Mozart, because his audience had probably heard it before.
—Gramps
Dear Gramps: Beautiful! Play it again!
—Dear Abby (September, 1993)

A person without a story is rootless, an amnesiac on a strange island.
—Source unknown

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told...man would live like beasts, only for the day.
What is life, after all? The future isn’t here yet, and you cannot foresee what it will bring. The present is only a moment, and the past is one long story. Those who don’t tell stories and don’t hear stories live only for the moment, and that isn’t enough.
—Naftali, the Storyteller (version of a quote from I.B. Singer)

We need more front porch storytelling...because every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burned down.
—Amadou Hampate Ba, a griot from the Mandingo people of West Africa

If the only birds that sang in the woods were the ones with perfect voices, the forest would be silent.
—Henry Thoreau

The job of the storyteller is to internalize the story, to savor it, and to reinvent the story’s internal connections. As a storyteller you function as an artist, not as a rolodex.
—Doug Lipman

Youngster to Librarian: "What have you got that will keep my grandpa awake when he reads to me?"
—Jerry Marcus, "Trudy" cartoon

When stories fly in and out of many mouths, they are apt to grow feathers.
—West African proverb

The only thing better than finding either a story or a treasure is to share it with a loved one.
—Turkish proverb

Without our stories, we would be bereft of memory or anticipation. We know we are something more than hairless bipeds because of our parables, sagas, fairy tales, myths, fables, epics and yarns. Not only have we created innumerable stories, we have found endless ways to recount them.
We dance them, draw them, mime them with masks and carve them on rocks.
We sing them around tables stacked with cold remains of a dinner.
We whisper them in the ears of sleepy children in dark bedrooms.
We stammer them out to confessors and therapists.
We inscribe them in letters and diaries.
We act them out in the clothes we wear, the places we go, the friends we cherish.
—Harvey Cox

Get to the point, and if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again.
—Stephen King

According to J.R.R. Tolkien, "is it true?" really means two questions:
"What kind of story is this? With what am I being faced here?"
"What am I supposed to think about what the people in the story did?"

As we share stories, we exalt in the joy of completed journeys, solved problems and happy endings.
—Joe Healy

Back to top.