Wordgrove Post & Review

THIS EDITION: story

Quoted In The Grove:
We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.
~Christina Baldwin

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.
~Sue Monk Kidd

For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
~Ursula K Le Guin

EndQuote:
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.
~Lewis Hine

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Exercise Prompt for Next Time: curiosity

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Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.
~Don Miguel Ruiz

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
~James M Barrie

Live your life as if you are writing your biography.
~Keshia Chante

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An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.
~Herbert Samuel

Autobiography: the supreme impertinence of offering a shattered mirror for impervious truth.
~author unknown

My life has been such a blur since I was 18, 19 years old. I haven’t even had time to contemplate my own life. By forcing yourself to write your life story you learn a great deal about yourself.
~Grant Achatz

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Despite the natural belittling of one’s self, the doubts, the insecurities, we have to wake up to the realisation that we all write our own autobiography, we are the authors of our life story. Realising that, write a good story with your life and make sure to write yourself as the protagonist. Be the hero of your journey.
~Yossi Ghinsberg

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
~Mary McCarthy

Everyone’s the hero in their own story. You’ve lived your life. You’re the good guy of your life, the protagonist of your own movie. Everyone knows that they have more in them to offer than they sometimes show.
~Sami Zayn

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.
~Kendrick Lamar

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It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that’s a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?
~Idris Elba

No one knows the three-dimensional story of who I am. Or anyone is.
~Henry Golding

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.
~Nipsey Hussle

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‘I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.’
~Maya Angelou

Stories give color to black and white information.
~Todd Stocker

Storytelling sticks in the mind because it attaches emotions to events, and that’s the way we remember things. If you don’t tell stories, no one will remember what you say.
~Nick Morgan

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.
~Robert McKee

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I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else’s story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn’t have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don’t even have to be magical.
~Chadwick Boseman

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You don’t just have a story ‒ you’re a story in the making, and you never know what the next chapter’s going to be. That’s what makes it exciting.
~Dan Millman

Nothing splendid was ever created in cold blood. Heat is required to forge anything. Every great accomplishment is the story of a flaming heart.
~Arnold H Glasow

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I’m almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. Every day, we’re writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that’s made all the difference.
~Drew Houston

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There’s a finite amount of time on this planet for each of us. Sometimes, the only way we figure out how to deal with that reality ‒ knowing that there will be an end to every story, and you don’t know how many chapters are left in your book ‒ is by living in denial.
~Eddie Vedder

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.
~Kurt Cobain (death, self-inflicted by shotgun)

As long as there’s breath in our lungs our story is still being written.
~Bart Millard

Your life story is a gift, and it should be treated as such.
~Emily V Gordon

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I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.
~Lena Waithe

I had hoped when my life was chronicled, it would be an inspirational story.
~Om Puri

The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay, but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.
~Pericles

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The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story.
~Don Miguel Ruiz

I’m a minor player in my own life story.
~Tony Wilson

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.
~George R R Martin

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.
~Maeve Binchy

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I’m a very private person. My life story isn’t for everybody.
~Barry Bonds

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
~Bill Bryson

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Everybody has their own story ‒ it’s who you are. If I wasn’t five-foot, I wouldn’t be who I am!
~Sabrina Carpenter

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.
~Maxine Kumin

I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’
~Frank Serpico

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
~Neil Gaiman

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Posted From The Grove

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.
~Edmund Pendleton

If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
~Clint Smith

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
~Walter Cronkite

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
~Margaret Thatcher

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History is the story of events, with praise or blame.
~Cotton Mather

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
~C S Lewis

History’s like a story in a way: it depends on who’s telling it.
~Dorothy Salisbury Davis

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News is the first draft of history.
~Ben Bradlee

News is history shot on the wing.
~Gene Fowler

Journalism is literature in a hurry.
~Matthew Arnold

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
~Cyril Connolly

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As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
~James McBride

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
~Arthur Miller

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In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.
~Mark Twain

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
~M P Singh

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If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.
~Hillary Clinton

‘LIFE Magazine’ decided to do a story about a young actress in Hollywood in 1954. And I made the cover. And I remember that the fellow who was doing the story on me said, ‘Listen, kid, I just want you to know, if Eisenhower gets a cold, you’re off the cover.’
~Rita Moreno

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
~George Bernard Shaw

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Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
~Ben Hecht

Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.
~Erwin Knoll

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.
~C E M Joad

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
~Norman Mailer

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
~Charles Baudelaire

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.
~Christopher Morley

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
~James G Watt

No news is good news. No journalists is even better.
~Nicolas Bentley

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.
~Napoleon Bonaparte

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When you have a problem, if you tell the truth, the problem becomes part of your past. If you lie, it becomes part of your future.
~Rick Pitino

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
~Doris Lessing

A story can sing the truth and not just tell it.
~Robert Barron

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~Leo Cookman: The Manufacture of Mystery (6 min. read) awkward at times, worth the investment

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~Jordan Halland: Story (3:40) visual essay

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~omozoc: STAND – stop motion woodworking (1:18) woodworking as butter carving, tickles the eye’s taste buds

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Money is the probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value… but then you have these master storytellers: the big bankers, the finance ministers… and they come, and they tell a very convincing story.
~Yuval Noah Harari

Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores ‒ these didn’t come out of nowhere.
~Paul Ryan

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
~Eric Ries

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Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request.
~Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Storytelling has driven faith and religious practice, keeping them alive for millennia. Just as every hymn, icon, and stained-glass window in a church links to a story, brands have the potential to build holistic identities.
~Martin Lindstrom

Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.
~Gary Vaynerchuk

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Starting a new job can be nerve-racking , but it’s also exciting. You’re embarking on a new future, positioning yourself to write a fresh story on a clean slate.
~Adena Friedman

It’s about communication. It’s about honesty. It’s about treating people in the organization as deserving to know the facts. You don’t try to give them half the story. You don’t try to hide the story. You treat them as ‒ as true equals, and you communicate and you communicate and communicate.
~Louis V Gerstner, Jr

I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it’s different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.
~Carlos Ghosn

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The story of Detroit’s bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat.
~Ben Shapiro

Everyone loves a comeback story, and everyone loves the underdog as well. I kind of feel like I’ve been the underdog. Hopefully that inspires people to not give up on themselves and their lives and not give up on their dreams.
~James Arthur

When you come back on top after you’ve fallen, it’s a better story.
~Freddie Freeman

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Ask anyone who’s successful how they got there, you’re going to hear a different story.
~Carol Burnett

Everyone has a different life story. Things happen rapidly for someone, and things move slowly for others.
~Barun Sobti

Sometimes people make it seem like you have to have certain prerequisites or a crazy life story in order to be successful in this world. But the truth is you really don’t.
~Stephen Curry

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‘The Sea Wolf’ is the story of a man who believes only in brute force. He is so firm in belief in his own ideas that he despises all who disagree with him. He preaches the doctrine of intolerance. He flaunts the notion that democracy is anything but weakness.
~Ida Lupino

I love the story behind the Vasa Museum: in the 17th century, the Swedish king was trying to make a statement by building a huge ship that would sail around Europe carrying the Swedish flag and proving that we were a force to be reckoned with, and basically, the ship was top-heavy, and so it went 300 or so yards and sank.
~Bill Skarsgard

I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, ‘Let’s go fight and win it all back!’ But at what price? What is the cost? It’s another story of lives and land. And I won’t do it.
~Volodymyr Zelensky

When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
~Brandon Stanton

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
~Elie Wiesel

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The story being told in ‘Star Wars’ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts…
~George Lucas

All the people who fought for freedom were my heroes. I mean, that was the sort of story I liked reading… freedom struggles and so on.
~Indira Gandhi

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Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
~Tim O’Brien

I love that idea that if you know someone’s story, it’s impossible not to love them. This is potentially hokey but incredibly true, as far as I’m concerned.
~Andrew Garfield

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it’s accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another’s eyes or heart.
~Sue Monk Kidd

Good storytelling is humanity’s great connector, and it just might keep the world from eating itself.
~James Genn

Storytelling is a vaccine against war.
~Annette Simmons

The power of storytelling is exactly this: to bridge the gaps where everything else has crumbled.
~Paulo Coelho

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.
~Karen Armstrong

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Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.
~Parker J Palmer

Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind.
~Kilroy J Oldster

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.
~Kilroy J Oldster

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Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups.
~Marshall Ganz

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.
~Bryce Courtenay

Those who tell the stories rule the world.
~author unknown

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§ VIDEO:

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
~Ben Okri

Every story needs an element of suspense ‒ or it’s lousy.
~Sydney Pollack

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don’t have conflict, it can’t be a good story.
~Donald Miller

There’s no story if there isn’t some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it’s more or less the norm.
~Wes Anderson

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Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
~Alfred Hitchcock

Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won’t tell and people feel it’s because I’m being secretive or something, but it’s actually because I’m ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.
~Abbas Kiarostami

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For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It’s the creating of the story.
~Damian Lewis

I’ll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don’t have any anthologies anymore, do we?
~Aaron Spelling

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A really irritating thing when you’re watching a film is if somebody’s accent isn’t bang-on ‒ it distracts you from getting into the story because you’re thinking: ‘Where are they from?’
~Rachel Hurd-Wood

A single prop that does not look real to an audience can louse you up. The same is true of the smallest flaw in setting up the motivation in a story line.
~Desi Arnaz

The story as told in “The Odyssey” doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
~Margaret Atwood

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
~Daniel Kahneman

The story-making process enables us to simplify complex information into the core essence of understanding.
~Y Gabriel

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I love taking prints, embroidery, appliques – precious things that seem to be from another time ‒ and using them to create a contemporary, new story.
~Alessandro Michele

I’ve always believed that clothing is a great way to tell your story.
~Carson Kressley

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Throughout my teenage years, I read ‘A Christmas Carol‘ by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.
~John Boyne

Cafe De Flore speaks of love, its joys, its pains and its dramas ‒ to love and to lose. This story upset me, I was upside-down, in the depths of myself.
~Vanessa Paradis

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In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
~Edward Robert B Lytton

When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.
~Sarah Parcak

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.
~Ashwin Sanghi

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The history of storytelling isn’t one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.
~Therese Fowler

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
~Gloria Steinem

Storytelling is the distinctly human implement designed to synthesize our purposeful interaction with reality.
~Kilroy J Oldster

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.
~Frank Zappa

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The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.
~Edgar Bronfman, Jr

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
~Steven Spielberg

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~British Short Film: The Darkest Blue (13:44) gone the way of Van Gogh

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~Omeleto: Re-Entry (9:15) death’s conversation with God ending with a twisty simple answer

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~Saim Sadiq: Nice Talking to You (18:55) in any language

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Maria: La Petite Fille De La Mer (6:00) story of charm incarnate, nary a word spoken

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A great book should leave you with many experiences. You live lives while reading it.
~William Styron

Master books, but do not let them master you. – Read to live, not live to read.
~Edward Robert B Lytton

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I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
~E M Forster

The story begins only when the book closes.
~Marshall McLuhan

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Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
~James Russell Lowell

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
~James Bryce

The wise man reads both books and life itself.
~Lin Yutang

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All of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.
~Bobby Knight

The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can’t read them.
~Mark Twain

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
~Mortimer Adler

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No, it’s not a very good story — its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
~Stephen King

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.
~Kendrick Lamar

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The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
~Naguib Mahfouz

We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax.
~Samuel Goldwyn

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The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you’re telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.
~Ari Aster

I didn’t go to the worlds of story to be reminded that on a dark road your anger and your cruelty pace just behind you, daring you to turn your head, unless you let them travel safely within you…
~Francis Spufford

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Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: ‘He/she was born, lived, died.’ Probably that is the template of our stories – a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
~Doris Lessing

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
~Jean-Luc Godard

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People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
~Steven Spielberg

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.
~H P Lovecraft

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§ MUSIC:

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.
~Diane Paulus

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,‘ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.
~B B King

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
~James Baldwin

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.
~Rihanna

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
~Stephen Sondheim

You might enter this story by the stage door.
~Munson Havens

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The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
~Malcolm Gladwell

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.
~Joshua Bell

A song ain’t nothin’ in the world but a story just wrote with music to it.
~Hank Williams (1923–1953)

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~One Direction: Story of My Life (4:08) family matters

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~Stranger Things: Dustin & Suzie • Never Ending Story (3:55) for the fans

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~Brandi Carlile: The Story (3:57) story with the answer of who

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~Taylor Swift: The Story of Us (4:26) bitter sugar

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~Phil Collins: Both Sides Of The Story (6:41) …on any question you got

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~2Pac: Tradin War Stories (5:40) w/ casualties

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~First recorded U2 performance: Stories For Boys (1:51) prophetic intro, performance ranges between historical > hysterical > who could have foreseen

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Mark Knopfler & Willy DeVille – Storybook Love (4:00) distinguished set & cast, unorthodox delivery

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~Nini Music ‒ LongMa (2:51) pink desert sand, wild horses, blue haired protagonist, Taiwanese folk metal, you script the story

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~Katica Illényi on the Theremin: Puccini • O Mio Babbino Caro (2:43) just because

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The story of life is quicker then the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.
~Jimi Hendrix

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
~Ani DiFranco

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The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
~Rumi

I’m always a sucker for a love story.
~Sofia Coppola

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
~Daphne du Maurier

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
~Robert J Sawyer

Life is one big love story with hundreds of little love stories within it.
~Ram Charan

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Every love story needs a catalyst of some sort.
~Ian Somerhalder

A good love story always keeps the pot boiling.
~James Patterson

True love stories never have endings.
~Richard Bach

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The more I worked on ‘Half Brother,’ the more it seemed to me the story was really about love in all its possible forms ‒ how and why we decide to bestow it, or withdraw it; how we decide what is more worthy of being loved, and what is less. We are masters of conditional love.
~Kenneth Oppel

No love story ends or begins out of accordance with how it needs to go.
~Rebecca Serle

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
~Neil Gaiman

The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity ‒ love. And the story of a love is not important ‒ what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
~Helen Hayes

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The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.
~Emil Ludwig

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In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero’s not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He’s one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.
~Marilyn Manson

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.
~John Hodgman

I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.
~Clive Barker

Every villain needs her story told.
~Abbi Glines

‘The Museum of Innocence’ is not about politics; it’s a love story, but I think it’s political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman.
~Orhan Pamuk

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Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply ‘talking through problems,’ as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.
~Bruce Feiler

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
~Orson Welles

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, ‘What? That’s your son.’
~John Waters

Storytelling is the greatest activity of any culture. Storytelling is how you build a family, how you pass along identity.
~Randall Wallace

~

You have to go to what the essence of what Pennywise is about – the dark power of adulthood. It’s not coincidence all the grown-ups in town are evil. This is not a story about a monster. It’s a story about the end of childhood.
~Andy Muschietti

‘Good Times’ is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren’t.
~Lynda Barry

~

The child began reading favorite stories of magic to the river, believing the tales would be carried to someone in need.
~Dr SunWolf

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.
~Florence Nightingale

I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.
~Fred Rogers

When I was a child, we used to look forward to the end of the day when we would hear another ten minutes of a story.
~Malorie Blackman

“Always remember,” the storyteller told the wide-eyed children, “once-upon-a-time in a tale also means Now.”
~Dr SunWolf

~~

GoComics.com

~~

Some men, in telling a fish story, will go to any length.
~Evan Esar

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.
~Groucho Marx

~

My sister Tiffany told me years ago, ‘You can never write about me.’ Then she called six months ago and said she wanted to be in a story. She was worried people thought I didn’t like her.
~David Sedaris

There are two sides to every story until the gossips get hold of it.
~Evan Esar

~

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
~J D Salinger

My whole life story is kind of a backhanded compliment.
~Tori Spelling

Our top story tonight: Famous TV dolphin flipper was arrested today on prostitution ring charges. He allegedly was seen transporting two 16 year olds across state line for immoral porpoises.
~Colin Mochrie

Jack Benny was, without a doubt, the bravest comedian I have ever seen work. He wasn’t afraid of silence. He would take as long as it took to tell the story.
~Bob Newhart

Life begins at 40 — but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
~Helen Rowland

Writing a story allows us to play with our imaginary friends when we are adults.
~Dr SunWolf

I’m aware of ‘Twilight,’ but I’ve never seen the movies or read any of the books. Frankly, the story leaves me cold — why do a vampire story about abstinence?
~Alan Ball

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.
~Mary Higgins Clark

“A Fable,” said the merry Æsop, with a twinkle in his witty eyes, “is a fictitious story about nothing that ever happened, related by nobody that ever lived. And the moral is, that every one is quite innocent, only they must not do it again!”
~S J Adair Fitz-Gerald

—

Yes, I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.
~Marina Abramovic

I think with anything where you delve into the back story of an artist, it kind of explains their work more intimately.
~Aaron Taylor-Johnson

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
~Stephen King

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.
~Fran Lebowitz

~~

Painted Hills, China

~~

Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.
~Philip Gerard

Storytelling is the calculated release of information.
~Alex Garland

Storytelling is the very soul of humankind made plain for all to experience.
~John Appius Quill

Storytelling is not something we do. Storytelling is who we are.
~Carmine Gallo

~

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice by work
~Donna Tartt

Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we’d naturally do.
~Dan Harmon

Because there is a natural storytelling urge and ability in all human beings, even just a little nurturing of this impulse can bring about astonishing and delightful results.
~Nancy Mellon

Because storytelling, and visual storytelling, was put in the hands of everybody, and we have all now become storytellers.
~Levar Burton

Good storytelling is harder than it sounds, but the easy part is that everyone has the ability to do it. Tap into it.
Peter Guber

~

Bedtime stories are a doorway to dreams.
~Terri Guillemets

I’m particularly intrigued by the creative intelligence that scripts our dreams. And I love how this dramatic energy finds its way to the page, into the one form that most precisely defines who we are: story.
~A A Attanasio

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A story in your head isn’t a story. It’s just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.
~Andy Weir

~

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
~Italo Calvino

I don’t mind UFO’s and ghost stories, it’s just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.
~Robert Stack

~~

@Writers Platform

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
~Pat Conroy

~

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
~Douglas Coupland

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
~Brandon Sanderson

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
~Christopher Morley

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
~Hannah Arendt

~

I could hardly sit through ‘Frozen.’ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.
~Jordan Peterson

You can use martial arts to tell a different story. Ang Lee used martial arts in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to talk about love.
~Jet Li

Fully understanding spoils the story — the best are always translucent.
~Terri Guillemets

~

It is said that the first storyteller crept at night to listen to the gods talking in their sleep — so each tale collected contained the breath of gods.
~author unknown

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
~Anne Carson

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.
~John Boorman

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn’t make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.
~Baz Luhrmann

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.
~Annie Besant

~

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is – full of surprises.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Once, during one of the jubilee tours, I was in the car immediately behind theirs and I watched Prince Philip telling the Queen a story. He kept her laughing for 20 minutes.
~Gyles Brandreth

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
~E M Forster

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.
~George Lucas

It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared ‒ as it always should be.
~H P Lovecraft

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
~Colleen Hoover

Storytelling wasn’t about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.
~Jennifer McMahon

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
~Octavia E Butler

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
~Patrick Rothfuss

Any story should be this way. It should feel like pulling something burning out of yourself. There you find what you are devoted to.
~Craig Childs

~

I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not ‘describe’ the pictures; the pictures would not ‘illustrate’ the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.
~Muriel Rukeyser

The picture alone, without the written word, leaves half the story untold.
~James Lafferty

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding.
~Jane Taylor

~

Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story.
~John Pentland Mahaffy

Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story.
~James Dashner

Sensationalism sells: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
~Tiger Woods

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story… They are terrible people.
~Nina Bawden

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

~

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you’re in it.
~David Simon

Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don’t want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.
~Hugh Jackman

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
~Mary Gaitskill

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
~Virginia Woolf

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it’s what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.
~Greg Rucka

The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.
~Ken Liu

~

I’m a storyteller; that’s what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven’t been and returning to tell a story they haven’t heard before.
~James Cameron (1 of only 3 to descend to bottom of Mariana Trench)

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
~Neil Gaiman

~

I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.
~Fred Rogers

A good story cries out to be told and the art of listening needs to be cultivated as much as the greatly desired gift of telling.
~Angelo Patri

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
~Paul Auster

Armenian folklore has it that three apples fell from Heaven: one for the teller of a story, one for the listener, and the third for the one who ‘took it to heart.’ What a pity Heaven awarded no apple to the one who wrote the story down.
~Nancy Willard

~

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
~Maya Angelou

There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.
~Isak Dinesen

~

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.
~John Lee Hooker

I once wrote a short story called ‘The Best Blues Singer in the World,’ and it went like this: ‘The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.’ End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I’ve been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
~August Wilson

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
~Arthur Miller

~

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.
~Edward Norton

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, ‘And now… My Novel!,’ which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
~George Saunders

~

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
~P D James

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
~Agatha Christie

A story untold could be the one that kills you.
~Pat Conroy

~

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It’s a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn’t have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
~Will Self

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
~Ray Bradbury

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story.
~Jose Saramago

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.
~William Golding

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.
~Haruki Murakami

~

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.
~George Lucas

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.
~Jack Horner

~

Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.
~Maria Tatar

Wine is a magician, for it loosens the tongue and liberates good stories.
~A Book of Old Songs, Healths, Toasts, Sentiments and Wise Sayings Pertaining to the bond of Good Fellowship

~

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~Ursula K Le Guin

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big screen fig-tree.
~Sylvia Plath

~

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.
~Sylvia Plath

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
~George Saunders

~

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
~Jules Renard

Sometimes I’ll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.
~Beck

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
~Katherine Dunn

~~

Prewritten Prompt: story

~~

Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
~Paul Tournier

Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.
~Jane Yolen

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world – God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.
~Fulton Oursler

~

It is said that the first storyteller crept at night to listen to the gods talking in their sleep — so each tale collected contained the breath of gods.
~author unknown

For a lot of folks who get sober, the process of getting and staying sober becomes their higher power, and it becomes a religion that sort of consumes a whole lot of them. I just don’t think that that’s necessary. I think that that can be a side note rather than the story of your life.
~Jason Isbell

—

Time, the earth, and death are living things, as stories are — so long as other living things exist to feed them, and for them to nourish in their turn.
~Robert Bringhurst

~

I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, ‘Henry, have you made your peace with God?’ Thoreau said, ‘I didn’t know we’d quarreled.’
~Stewart Udall

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
~Mary Catherine Bateson

~

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.
~Elizabeth McCracken

~

All stories end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you.
~Ernest Hemingway

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
~Stephen Hawking

I wanted there to be doors. If, in a story, you found the one panel in the fabric of the workaday world that was hinged, and it opened, and it turned out that behind the walls of the world flashed the gold and peacock blue of something else, and you were able to pass through, that would be a moment in which all the decisions that had been taken in this world, and all the choices that had been made, and all the facts that had been settled, would be up for grabs again: all possibilities would be renewed, for who knew what lay on the other side?
~Francis Spufford

~~

§ The Exercise:

anticipation

delicious shiver of chilled sheets
curled core of warmth
fetal comfort
calories of life burning hot
warming the tight pod
’til, unfolding
limbs like flower petals open
antennae for the incoming
favorite dream-before-sleep
day-relived reverie
bedtime story

~

Complicated

Remember Maggie’s grade school bestie
the brightly sprightly sweet Melody
‘n her griftin’ driftin’ brother
Handsome Harmon, E
queried mother to the father

Saw them run
the daring reach
slow way they hugged
that hungry kiss
only love can teach

‘Tweren’t the brother
but his sister
this the reason
our Maggie missed her
said the missus to her mister

Tho by law I must turn them in
how can love be considered sin
when love itself does most the choosin’
hell to pay, but I ain’t losin’
blood to law jails love’s behoovin’

~

booked for life

one whole-indivisible-particolored world
just walked by, a stranger
one unknown genius dolt enskinned
one fractured self-contained universe
and pin cushion just passed my way

entity: an etched groove
pingponging, ricocheting questionnaire
one-of-a-kind autobiography
filtered biography
all unrecorded
dead
lost and forgotten
untapped and untaped story
mayhaps the stars are getting this down

~

treasury

red tiled rooftops
protection for families
torrid heat
stormy onslaughts
heaven’s enmity
evaporating secrets
private rooms for loving
and birthing words
for reading and writing
stories

~

lesson #16

gobsmacked to be
God smacked
brain wracked
trace offending fact
the story track
that held one back

the curious knack
find white in black
rainbow grey
front for back
the moral hack
made mobs attack

yet Fate would speak, address the heart
pass Tower’s babble that tore apart
like garlic bulbs fresh the garden
vicious breath but healthy, hardens
learn from sins their consequence
turn Wisdom White what history darkened

~

found words

pretend at prayers
to be religious
so many layers
mere superstitions
yes, but weave
the considered words
the power that myths
bring to a curse

~

midweek wander

as ever
the story of timing
the band breaking down
music is over
shepherds pie
as consolation
heavy on the garlic
‘s okay
I was going home alone
anyway

~

5s ‘n 7s

music or karaoke
Yes, said the storied Voice, both
battleground’s safe common ground
croon, intone said murdered song
worlds that sing can get along

~

one white egret, one brown cow
raw meat, strict veggie diets
different sets entirely
buddies grazing side by side
stories of the green pasture

~

earthy place suspicious spice
glamour free at bargain price
seaside sunset island life
travel, love’s escape from strife
provides the story’s conflict

~

Endure hell, shed a lifetime
Drop curtain, end memories
Stories, star kept diaries
Book of Life biographies
Enter: Library of Man

~

day’s end performance
stories from the stoop
different language
new rhythm’d cadence
voices rise and fall
change nature midstride
become a music

~

life ineffable
stories from childhood
still, something survived
compelling fables
unworthy belief
foretold history
the full arc of man

~

stacked apartments
seven storeys high
seven stories deep
storeys plying weed
stories full of sweep
begged to shed some light
seven storeys tried

~

first love excitement
wild-bred, trained expectations
story of strangers
when worlds unite words collide
old selves reluctant to yield

~

brazen bully bear
turn the page to nightingale
the story of home
driven by diff’rent hungers
reach for empire ‒ feed the world

~

to do is to work
add play to equation
to work is to do
add pleasure to the story
waking at will with a goal

~

the story of clouds
of wind and waves and the Earth
won’t remember us

~

creation story
story of recreation
born twin of the Same

~

wild imaginings
throw to the wall see what sticks
spaghetti stories

~ ~

The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
~Abraham Maslow

Mellow doesn’t always make for a good story, but it makes for a good life.
~Anne Hathaway

~

I’m going to tell you the story about the geese which fly 5,000 miles from Canada to France. They fly in V-formation but the second ones don’t fly. They’re the subs for the first ones. And then the second ones take over – so it’s teamwork.
~Alex Ferguson

Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story.
~Casey Stengel

~

I never feel lonely if I’ve got a book – they’re like old friends. Even if you’re not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. And they’re part of your history. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life.
~Emilia Fox

And once opened, the door would never entirely shut behind you either. A kind of mixture would begin. A tincture of this world’s reality would enter the other world… while this world would be subtly altered too, changed in status by the knowledge that it had an outside.
~Francis Spufford

~

As to the other tales contained in this work, and, indeed, to my tales generally, I can make but one observation. I am an old traveller. I have read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more than all. My brain is filled, therefore, with all kinds of odds and ends. In travelling, these heterogeneous matters have become shaken up in my mind, as the articles are apt to be in an ill-packed travelling-trunk; so that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it; and I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
~Geoffrey Crayon (Washington Irving)

Reason #7 for reading folktales: They remind us that sometimes the blessings and the curses get all mixed up.
~Dr SunWolf

~

Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times.
~Rives Collins

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.
~Kilroy J Oldster

~

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
~Madeleine L’Engle

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
~Ben Okri

~

I think we don’t learn early enough in life the true value of things. Even words, it seems to me, should have value. One ought not to squander them. Talk for talk’s sake never meant anything to me. That is probably why I became a good listener, although I must have learned something of it from my Indian friends. Indians never talk. They know how futile argument is. The story-teller is listened to, respectfully and silently, because he is expert testimony.
~George A Dorsey

Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.
~Native American Proverb

~

There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that ” being” is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.
~Parmenides

So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just beginning.
~Conrad Veidt

~ ~

The Olio
Quotes harvested from: https://bqotd.com, https://brainyquote.com, https://quotegarden.com, https://wisesayings.com

~

The Salmagundi
Video Harvest: https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

The Funnies: https://gocomics.com

~. .~