"Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story." Laurens van der Post, Anthropologist

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
 Stephen King

"Images are the midwives between experience and language. The miracle of image making, even a rudimentary scribble or doodle, is that it helps birth a story that holds countless memories and emotions." Cathy Malchiodi

"A key--perhaps the key--to leadership is the effective communication of a story." Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership

"If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life." Siberian Elder

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin

"It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story." Native American saying

"Nothing lasts forever except the memories and stories we can pass down to the next generation." Jackie Starr

"By nature, we are storytelling beings. To be human is to have a story to tell." Cathy Malchiodi

“Since caveman days around the fire, humans have been hardwired for storytelling. Books, movies, television, advertising, news, speeches, even scientific reports, conference panels and, of course, relating our life experiences to one another - it’s all storytelling. It’s how we best learn.” Ronni Bennett http://ronnibennett.typepad.com/

"Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told." Carolyn Heilbrun

“As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down.” Steve Martin

“We step into the future with less connection to ancestral guidance than any human generation before us. Although we have invented amazing technologies for saving data, we are at risk of forgetting our personal, family and cultural stories. We broadcast our voices over vast distances, but talk less to our neighbours. Haunting these changes are the spectres of continuing violence, planetary degradation and, above all, the danger that we'll come to believe the implacable message of the powerful: that resistance is futile. The old stories teach us that resistance is never futile.” Dan Yashinsky, American-born storyteller and writer, Suddenly They Heard Footsteps, 2004

“Language always tells long stories if we listen; it's littered with the ways we look at things.” Michael Wood, American academic and writer, The New York Times, May 21, 1995

“We have always had storytellers and makers of fiction since the days of the cave-man. There is an eternal impulse in human nature to enliven the actual working life by the invention of tales of another kind of life, recognizable by its likeness to ordinary life, but so arranged that things happen more dramatically and pleasingly — which indeed is the world in a glorified and idealized form.” John Buchan, Scottish writer and politician, The Novel and Fairy Tale, 1931

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser