Inspirational Quotes About Storytelling

Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

In a previous post, I mentioned one of the things I love most about animation: its ability to tell a story. I started thinking about how to make a post that would expand on that theme. I wanted to elaborate on why storytelling is so special. Although I also believe in doing art for its own sake, I think it’s valuable to think about the purpose behind what we do as artists.     

Over the years, I’ve heard many meaningful explanations of the power of storytelling, and so I thought to share them here. I love writing down quotes from what I hear and read, so it seemed natural to put the ones on storytelling together here. I hope you find these excerpts inspiring!

Story is our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward 

 Writer Ursula Le Guin 

Skill is knowing how to do something; wisdom is knowing when and why to do it, or to refrain from doing it. While stories may display skill aplenty, in technique or character or plot, what the best of them offer is wisdom. They hold a living reservoir of human possibilities, telling us what has worked before, what has failed, where meaning and purpose and joy might be found 

 Writer Scott Russell Sanders

For when we get to the end of the story, you will know more than you do now

 Author Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen

If we can see the story we are in when we fall into our various compulsive behaviors and moods, then we might know how to move through them more freely and with less distress 

 Psychotherapist Thomas Moore

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story 

 Writer Rebecca Solnit

For a long time ... I was really ambivalent about becoming a storyteller (first in the realm of theater and only later in the realm of books); in a way, the fact that I wasn’t in a developing nation working to create food distribution systems made me feel like a moral failure.

 Part of what eventually helped me get over that ambivalence was the realization that stories do in fact have the power to inspire listeners/readers/audiences to [make the world a better place]; actually, we seem to be getting closer to measurable evidence of this … People say all the time that art can make people better, makes the world more beautiful, blah, blah, blah, but we’re usually talking about an abstract idea, immeasurable and unproven. It turns out, though, that stories, if they elevate people, have the power to make them quantifiably more open-hearted. 

 … I was never able to figure out how to express the difference between what makes a story elevating and what makes it ghastly in that here’s-a-Message way until I came across an essay by D.H. Lawrence, an analysis of Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature. He had this to say: 

 ‘The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. The mind follows later, in the wake.’ 

 ... The morality in a story needs to be passionate and implicit—a morality which changes the blood. If you tell a story, or create any work of art, in which you’re trying to change people’s minds, you’re being a preacher first and a storyteller (a distant) second, and the story will ring false. But if the work’s morality is directed at the blood, if it communicates itself in how the characters treat each other and themselves, in how they move through the world, then its creators are simply storytellers, fulfilling the responsibility with which the power of art has invested them and, with luck, “provoking a desire,” as Slate puts it, “to make a difference"

  Author Joel Derfner

Film and television, newspapers, books and radio together have an influence over individuals that was unimagined a hundred years ago. This power confers great responsibility on all who work in the media 

... Although it is perhaps too much to hope that the media will actually promote the ideals and principles of compassion, we should at least be able to expect that those involved will take care if there is potential for negative impact … Perhaps we might be able to find a way to connect more directly those who create stories for news and entertainment and the viewer, the reader and the listener 

 Political and religious leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Do you think story-tellers have a responsibility to drive us forward as a society, to encourage us to see things in new ways, and if you do, does this ever weigh heavily on you? Do you ever feel that sort of responsibility? 

 No… I’ll tell you the way I think of it. I think story-tellers can’t help it. Your world view affects what you see in the work and it affects what you make… I really try not to think of writing as a burden at all. My job’s to fall in love, because it has got to sustain me for many years… The politics inherent to the show are just what come out of me when I write about this thing. It’s really about being inspired and being in love… I need it to feel like a love-affair… The ultimate way in which art can be political is in that I think it engenders empathy, which is the thing that politicians can’t seem to do. If you feel like you know someone because you’ve spent two hours contemplating their life in a story or you’ve seen them in a movie and been under their skin, you can’t dismiss them as ‘other’ anymore 

 Writer Lin-Manuel Miranda on creating Hamilton

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?  

Author Henry David Thoreau

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel  

 Writer and activist Maya Angelou

Stories are like presents – GIFTS TO THE PEOPLE! They help us understand the world and make it a better place 

 Director Mike Rianda (paraphrased based on memory)

I used to think that animation was about moving stuff. In order to make it really great, you bounce it, squash it, stretch it, make the eyes go big. But, as time went on, I started loving animating a character who had a kind of burning passion in her heart. Suddenly, animation became for me not so much about moving stuff as it was about moving the audience 

 Artist Glen Keane

Creating animation means creating a fictional world. That world soothes the spirit of those who are disheartened and exhausted from dealing with the sharp edges of reality 

 Director Hayao Miyazaki

He [Walt Disney] probably did more to heal, or at least soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world 

 News journalist Eric Sevareid

Stories are medicine for our individual spirits
 Writer and activist Gloria Steinem

Anyone out there who’s in junior high, high school, working it out, suffering. There are days you’re gonna feel sad, angry and scared, that’s nothing you can choose. But you can make stuff. Make films. Draw. Write. It will make a world of difference 

 Director Pete Docter 

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories 

 Psychiatrist Carl Jung 

Often if you go deeply enough into your own story, you find the story of other people
 Playwright and activist Eve Ensler

…Art can foster our rich imaginative engagement with the world in suprising forms; it can provoke reflection by making us see the world afresh form strange, new or even fantastical angles; and it can bring our daydreams out into a peculiar kind of refracted light, wherein we see and feel things more intensely and pleasurably for a while. In a medium that involves moving image, sound and music, art may even be able to sing us into a distinctive kind of lyric receptiveness 

 Author David Whitley

What’s made you so hungry to keep telling stories? 

Well, is there anything better? I can’t think of anything better in life. We surround ourselves with stories, we live and die by stories, we make words by stories, we also make peace; we learn lessons through stories but we also just escape from the craziness of this world through stories. There’s nothing more powerful than a story. It beats any weapon, it beats any tool… Story is our way of connecting with each other and, like I say, that’s why we’re here… You know, folks, it’s an awesome universe, it really is. Good stuff and bad stuff. It’s our job to cherish the good stuff and help ourselves and others survive the bad stuff. And this is how we do it!  

Concept artist Iain McCaig

Why do you think art was important 30,000 years ago? 

 Because [humans] invented art. They were the ones who invented art and they’re our great grandparents. It wasn’t until modern humans came on the scene that art came on the scene. I have to tell you the truth, when I hear of schools thinking that they’re going to save budget money because they will cut out the art program… That’s how we’re defined! There was no art before [humans] came

Author Jean M. Auel on writing The Land of Painted Caves

Wow! Quotes like these remind me why I do what I do and inspire me to create my own definitions of the power of story-telling. Now back to drawing!