Story Teller Quotes

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

So here is my story, may it bring Some smiles and a tear or so, It happened once upon a time, Far away, and long ago, Outside the night wind keens and wails, Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Conspiracy adepts love story-tellers who want to exorcise their fear, mixing rational and irrational elements to construct a plausible narrative for people craving a meaningful decoding and a breathtaking clarification. ("What after bowling alone?" )

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.

Be the story teller in your life...never let anyone dictate what you’re about.

You've heard tales of beauty and the beast. How a fair maid falls in love with a monster and sees the beauty of his soul beneath the hideous visage. But you've never heard the tale of the handsome man falling for the monstrous woman and finding joy in her love, because it doesn't happen, not even in a story-teller's tale.

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar - if he is financially fortunate.

Great story tellers are great liars. None of those complex characters, events and settings are anything but the figments of their own imaginations

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

That's not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less solid, and more liquid taking the shape of its container.

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

Not every story leaves the teller unharmed.

Basically all the religions,sciences and powers of the world boil down to a simple truth. The Best Story Teller will win in the end!

We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

I am a teller of stories...a weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing, and in the right weather stand on my head. I know seven words of Latin. I have a little magic and a trick or two. I know the proper way to meet a dragon, can fight dirty but not fair, and once swallowed thirty oysters in a minute. I am not domestic. I am a luxury, and in that sense, necessary.

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." (A Teller of Tales)

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.

I no longer believe that people are born without virtue. It gets beaten out. Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.

The fortune teller gazed into my eyes and whispered, "Your deepest desire will come true tonight." When I came home, I found my wife's dead body lying in her own blood.

That was the best kind of story: when the teller was as much under its spell as the listener.

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up meat attractive to flies.

Compelling fiction often obscures the humble truth.

Our stories are the tellers of us.

I was a candle that had never known a flame, and now that the flame was lit, I softened and glowed in a way I had not known was possible.

A child is a best story teller if it is encouraged to do so. Parents shouldn't get confused between a lie and an excuse. They should let their children open for excuses and see how many fantasies come into existence.

I ask you right here to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must see all scars as beauty... because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this story teller is alive. The next think you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

Being strong does not disqualify you from being beautiful.

People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.

Man is essentially a story-telling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to truth.

Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

There is always a moment when stories end, a moment when everything is blue and black and silent, and the teller does not want to believe it is over, and the listener does not, and so they both hold their breath and hope fervently as pilgrims that it is not over, that there are more tales to come, more and more, fitted together like a long chain coiled in the hand. They hold their breath; the trees hold theirs, the air and the ice and the wood and the Gate. But no breath can be held forever, and all tales end.

Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle...

Imagine what ideas are locked up in the hearts and minds of women who simply lack the tools to express them.

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.

Stories come in all different kinds." Hester scooted closer, clearly enjoying the subject at hand. "There's tales, which are light and fluffy. Good for a smile on a sad day. Then you got yarns, which are showy-yarns reveal more about the teller than the story. After that there's myths, which are stories made up by whole groups of people. And last of all, there's legends." She raised a mysterious eyebrow. "Legends are different from the rest on account no one knows where they start. Folks don't tell legends; they repeat them. Over and over again through history.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.

Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.

Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God.

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.

Then you are quite behind the age,” said the Water-rat.  “Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. 

Each story provides a beginning, a middle and an end, the trick is, never seperate them through the chapters or you'll miss the meaning of the entire book.

I was a mouse trapped in a corner, looking for a crack to flee through but despairing of finding one.

You speak of love? Love is a sickness that causes men and women to do stupid things, the sorts of things that leave them sad and broken when the fever passes.

If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.

We who work in fantasy today take the threads from all the story tellers of the past. From the ancient, many colored threads we work to weave a new cloth. If the landscape, the characters, and the creatures here call up the old tales told the beside the fire, when stories went from mouth to ear instead of page to eye then I have woven well and the dreamer continues to dream.

You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small,' I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. 'Be little. Don't try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.' I got all of these sayings at my tongue's end, used to go through the streets of Chicago muttering them to myself.

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.

Rich only matters if he marries you," I said grimly. "Handsome matters not at all.

If a story does its job, it doesn't ever end. Not really. But it can change. This is the nature of folktales. They shift to fit each teller. Take whatever form suits the bearer best. What begins as a story of sorrow can be acknowledged, held like a sweetheart to the chest, rocked and sung to. And then it can be set down to sleep. It can become an offering. A lantern. An ember to lead you through the dark.

The world is full of travellers. Once in a year go to someplace you have never been before. You will meet Confused seekers, Hopeful wanderers, Enthusiastic story-tellers, Happy families. Look into their eyes and stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead any moment. Look at the world. It’s more beautiful than any dream you'd have ever seen. Make the most beautiful travel diary and open it up your third generation because only your grandchildren will understand what your children will fail to.

It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it—I act. And I always get what I want.

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.

I am a face in a trance, evoking duende. My face imbues breath and stuns you with star-spirit. I am grove-face, story-teller face, and dawn-bringer face. A face as common as carrots and celery, called upon as a father to be cook, waiter, servant, and maid.

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began to affect the netting under which the three children lay. It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries. The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:-- "Sir?" "Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes. "What is that?" "It's the rats," replied Gavroche. And he laid his head down on the mat again. The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap. Still the little one could not sleep. "Sir?" he began again. "Hey?" said Gavroche. "What are rats?" "They are mice." This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more. "Sir?" "Hey?" said Gavroche again. "Why don't you have a cat?" "I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate her." This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow began to tremble again. The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:-- "Monsieur?" "Hey?" "Who was it that was eaten?" "The cat." "And who ate the cat?" "The rats." "The mice?" "Yes, the rats." The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate cats, pursued:-- "Sir, would those mice eat us?" "Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche. The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:-- "Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!

Does that change things?” asked the old man. “Maybe Anansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.

Our fascination with feminine beauty is elemental. It is said that men wish to possess the princess and women wish to be the princess, but I believe that is only part of the truth. We are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why we do it. Perhaps when we see a woman with the aspect of an angel, our souls are tricked into following her, mistaking her for a guide to paradise. The opposite, of course, is also true.

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.

But when the wizard is onstage as the main character, you have to adopt what I call the Jack Vance Rule. I call it this because Jack Vance is the first author successfully and adroitly to have applied this rule in his The Dying Earth. The Jack Vance Rule is: (1) The wizard has to be able to do something unusual, or else he is not a wizard, (2) he cannot do everything, or else there is no drama; therefore (3) the story teller has to communicate to the reader whatever the dividing line is that separates what the wizard can do from what he cannot do, so that the reader can have a reasonable expectation of knowing what the wizard can and cannot do.

The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means whatever is there. I used to think that it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend the universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in the Yale Review, if they are any good at all you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, or the state in sane asylum, or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs. And his need of course is to be lifted up. There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the price of truth, even in fiction.

A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables. A storyteller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word “hekayah” story, fable, news, hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word “haki”, which means talk or conversation. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling.

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires." from a preface to Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Augusta Gregory

key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

To My Priestess Sisters To my priestess sisters: the keepers of mysteries, the medicine women, the story keepers and story tellers, the holy magicians, the wild warriors, the original ones, the ones who carry the ancients within the marrow of your bones, the ones forged in the fires, the ones who have bathed in thier own blood, the heroines who wear thier scars as stars, the ones who give birth to their visions and dreams, the ones who weep and howl upon the holy altars, the avatars, the mothers, maidens and crones, the mystics, the oracles, the artists, the musicians, the virgins, the sensual and sexual, the women of our world- I honor you. I stand for you and with you. I celebrate both your autonomy and our sisterhood of One. We are many. We are fierce. We are tender. We are the change agents and we are radically holding and clearing space for the bursting forth of the holy seeds of the collective conscience and consciousness. We are manifestors and flames of purification and transformation. We are living our lives in authenticity, vulnerability, transparency and unapologetically. We are committed to integrity, impeccability, accountability, responsibility and passionate love. We are here on purpose, with purpose and give no energy to conformity, acceptance or approval. We are the daughters of the earth and the courageous of the cosmos. Priestess, keep living your life passionately, raising the cosmic vibrations and lowering your standards for no one. You are brazenly blessed and a force of nature. Nurture yourself and one another. You are a crystalline bridge between realms and uniting heaven and earth. You are a priestess and you are divinely anointed, appointed and unstoppable.

Someone is pounding on a door within you and hoping for an answer. They want to tell us the secret tale of ourselves. The stories we’ve never told. Some African tribes believe if you were to tell someone your entire story the audience would actually become you. From then on, the only life the teller would have would be in and through the listener. Some believe this is the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. How I wished for my story to be blemish free. How I wished to be a good-natured soul giving back to the world, regardless of how broken I was. In the end, it’s those things we are willing to die to change that sculpt our story. Some people open the floodgates of their minds and hearts so memories burst forth like water through a breached dam. Pieces of our lives can be found among the floating wreckage, and somewhere, the presence of God hovers over the surface of the deep. Inside, I am treading, biding my time, waiting for the magic I thought I owned as a child. Many seek this enchantment. I sought my wife, daughter and the power to conjure hope.

Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? Authors disagree. Authors are human and fallible and foolish. Stories are lies after all, tales of people who never existed and the things that never actually happened to them. Why should we read them? Why should we care? The teller and the tale are very different. We must not forget that. Ideas–written ideas–are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our thoughts from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer’s tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller’s breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past. But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer’s voice, and are thus shunned. In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.

The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed.

My favorite definition of fear is “False Expectations Appearing Real,” and when I allow myself to remember that all of my thoughts are merely fleeting physiology, I feel less moved when my story-teller goes haywire and my circuitry is triggered. At the same time, when I remember that I am at one with the universe, then the concept of fear loses its power. To help protect myself from having a trigger-happy anger or fear response, I take responsibility for what circuitry I purposely exercise and stimulate. In an attempt to diminish the power of my fear/anger response, I intentionally choose not to watch scary movies or hang out with people whose anger circuitry is easily set off. I consciously make choices that directly impact my circuitry. Since I like being joyful, I hang out with people who value my joy.

Several Mohammedan countries in North Africa and the Middle East are precisely in a period of fourteenth-century development and can show us, in a number of respects, a reflection of what the European medieval world was like. Similar towns, their houses piled one upon another, narrow swarming streets, enclosing a few sumptuous palaces; the same extremes of appalling misery among the poor and of opulence among great lords; the same story-tellers at the corners of the streets, propagating both myths and news; the same population, nine-tenths illiterate, submitting through long years to oppression and then suddenly rebelling violently in murderous panic; the same influence of religious conscience upon public affairs; the same fanaticism; the same intrigues among the powerful; the same hate among rival factions; the same plots so curiously ravelled that their solution lies only in the spilling of blood!

The known world was not so circumscribed then, nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human bonding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening. A few did still speak of the rain, stood at gates in a drizzle, looked into the sky, made predictions inexact and individual, as if they were still versed in bird, berry or water language, and for the most part people indulged them, listened as if to a story, nodded, said “Is that so?” went away believing not a word, but to pass the story like a human currency to someone else. The key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals sails appeared charmed. They blazed red in the day and silver at night, like a magician’s cloak, hinting at mysteries concealed beneath, which Tella planned to uncover that night. Drunken laughter floated above her as Tella delved deeper into the ship’s underbelly in search of Nigel the Fortune-teller. Her first evening on the vessel she’d made the mistake of sleeping, not realizing until the following day that Legend’s performers had switched their waking hours to prepare for the next Caraval. They slumbered in the day and woke after sunset. All Tella had learned her first day aboard La Esmeralda was that Nigel was on the ship, but she had yet to actually see him. The creaking halls beneath decks were like the bridges of Caraval, leading different places at different hours and making it difficult to know who stayed in which room. Tella wondered if Legend had designed it that way, or if it was just the unpredictable nature of magic. She imagined Legend in his top hat, laughing at the question and at the idea that magic had more control than he did. For many, Legend was the definition of magic. When she had first arrived on Isla de los Sueños, Tella suspected everyone could be Legend. Julian had so many secrets that she’d questioned if Legend’s identity was one of them, up until he’d briefly died. Caspar, with his sparkling eyes and rich laugh, had played the role of Legend in the last game, and at times he’d been so convincing Tella wondered if he was actually acting. At first sight, Dante, who was almost too beautiful to be real, looked like the Legend she’d always imagined. Tella could picture Dante’s wide shoulders filling out a black tailcoat while a velvet top hat shadowed his head. But the more Tella thought about Legend, the more she wondered if he even ever wore a top hat. If maybe the symbol was another thing to throw people off. Perhaps Legend was more magic than man and Tella had never met him in the flesh at all. The boat rocked and an actual laugh pierced the quiet. Tella froze. The laughter ceased but the air in the thin corridor shifted. What had smelled of salt and wood and damp turned thick and velvet-sweet. The scent of roses. Tella’s skin prickled; gooseflesh rose on her bare arms. At her feet a puddle of petals formed a seductive trail of red. Tella might not have known Legend’s true name, but she knew he favored red and roses and games. Was this his way of toying with her? Did he know what she was up to? The bumps on her arms crawled up to her neck and into her scalp as her newest pair of slippers crushed the tender petals. If Legend knew what she was after, Tella couldn’t imagine he would guide her in the correct direction, and yet the trail of petals was too tempting to avoid. They led to a door that glowed copper around the edges. She turned the knob. And her world transformed into a garden, a paradise made of blossoming flowers and bewitching romance. The walls were formed of moonlight. The ceiling was made of roses that dripped down toward the table in the center of the room, covered with plates of cakes and candlelight and sparkling honey wine. But none of it was for Tella. It was all for Scarlett. Tella had stumbled into her sister’s love story and it was so romantic it was painful to watch. Scarlett stood across the chamber. Her full ruby gown bloomed brighter than any flowers, and her glowing skin rivaled the moon as she gazed up at Julian. They touched nothing except each other. While Scarlett pressed her lips to Julian’s, his arms wrapped around her as if he’d found the one thing he never wanted to let go of. This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals were as ephemeral as feelings, eventually they would wilt and die, leaving nothing but the thorns.

Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.