Story Quotes

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The following paragraphs are quotes from articles/books about stories. I've really gotten interested in stories since writing patterns. It seems the stories are a powerful way to transfer learning. It's amazing!

Stories are like flames that warm our hearts. They help us overcome our mortality.

Gerard Tsonakwa, telling Abenaki Indian legends during an evening presentation at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum.

Notes from Tell Me A Story, Roger C. Shank, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1990. Page numbers are in parens.

(xi) For years I have been fascinated by the seemingly intrinsic human desire to tell a good story. Children love to hear stories. Adults love to read or watch reproductions of long stories and love to tell and listen to shorter stories. People need to talk, to tell about what has happened to them, and they need to hear about what has happened to others, especially when the others are people they care about or who have had experiences relevant to the hearer's own life.

(xii) This book, then, is about how we think...how we think about life.

(10) To do this effectively, we had to have been very clever in how we labeled the data we originally perceived so we can find it again in circumstances that we could not have anticipated initially.

If a prior experience is understood only in terms of the generalization or principle behind the case, we don't have as many places to put the new case in memory. We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.

We are more persuasive when we tell stories. For example, we can simply state our beliefs, or we can tell stories that illustrate them. If John explains to Bill that he is in a quandary about whether to court Mary or Jane, and if after listening to John's description, Bill responds "Mary," his reply would usually be seen as useless advice. We need justifications for the beliefs of others in order to begin to believe them ourselves. If Bill responds, "Mary, because Mary is Irish, and Irish women make good wives," he is being more helpful but not necessarily more believable. But if Bill responds with a story about a similar situation that he was in or that he heard about and how the choice was made in that case and how it worked out, John is likely to be quite interested and to take the advice offered by the story more to heart.

(11) Stories illustrate points better than simply stating the points themselves because, if the story is good enough, you usually don't have to state your point at all; the hearer thinks about what you have said and figures out the point independently. The more the hearer does, the more he or she will get out of your story.

(12) Human memory is story-based. Not all memories are stories. … Not every experience makes a good story, but, if it does, the experience will be easier to remember.

(12) Oddly enough, we come to rely upon our own stories so much that it seems that all we can tell ourselves are stories as well. … Communication consists of selecting the stories that we know and telling them to others at the right time.

(14) …wisdom is often ascribed to those who can tell just the right story at the right moment and who often have a large number of stories to tell. Furthermore, these stories rarely draw every conclusion for their hearer. Rather, they present information, often leaving out the final conclusions.

(15) The…problem is simply that humans are not really set up to understand logic. People tell stories because they know that others like to hear stories. The reasons that people like to hear stories, however, is not transparent to them. People need a context to help them relate what they have heard to what they already know. We understand events in terms of events we have already understood. When a decision-making heuristic, or rule of thumb, is presented to us without a context, we cannot decide the validity of the rule we have heard, nor do we know where to store this rule in our memories. Thus, what we are presented is both difficult to evaluate and difficult to remember, making it virtually useless. People who fail to couch what they have to say in memorable stories will have their rules fall on deaf ears despite their best intentions and despite the best intentions of their listeners. A good teacher is not one who explains things correctly but one who couches explanations in a memorable (i.e., an interesting) format.

(16) In the end all we have…are stories and methods of finding and using those stories.

(22) By storing information about the problems of others, even if they are fictional characters, we can learn from their actions. When our own circumstances match those of people we have heard about, we can conclude that we need to modify our behavior so as to learn from the commonality of experience.

(29) When people talk to you, they can only tell you what they know. And the knowledge that people have about the world around them is really no more than the set of experiences that they have had.

(39) Is "forty-two" a story? Of course it is, and it isn't. It doesn't sound like a story; it's more the name of a story, so to speak. In some sense, every story is simply the name of a longer story. No one tells all the details of any story, so each story is shortened. How much shortening has to take place until there is no story left? A story shortened so that it ceases to be understood is no longer a story, but what is understandable to one person may not be understandable to another, so it is clear that "story" is a relative term. In any case, as long as it is understood, it remains a story. For this reason, there are some very short stories.

(54) I might add that the most you can expect from an intelligent being is a really good story. To get human beings to be intelligent means getting them to have stories to tell and having them hear and perhaps use the stories of others. … Good storytellers will make their stories seem interesting and that interestingness makes the stories more memorable and hence more useful to an understander. Good storytellers cause positive responses in their listeners. Thus, good storytellers seem very intelligent.

(54) It would seem, then, that the cliché "Experience is the best teacher" is quite true. We learn from experience, or to put this more strongly, what we learn are experiences. The educational point that follows from this is that we must teach cases and the adaptation of cases by telling stories, not teach rules and the use of rules by citing rules. We may never find ourselves in a situation where the rules we were taught apply exactly. Ordinarily, we find answers for ourselves. Lots of stories and cases help, but methods of applying these stories and cases, especially in places where they weren't originally supposed to apply, help more.

(149) Knowing a culture means knowing the stories that the culture provides and observing how people interpret their own experiences and construct their own stories in terms of the standard stories of the culture.

The language of the culture also reflects the stories of the culture. One word or simple phrasal labels often describe the story adequately enough in what we have termed culturally common stories. To some extent, the stories of a culture are observable by inspecting the vocabulary of that culture. Often entire stories are embodied in one very culture-specific word. The story words unique to a culture reveal cultural differences.

(158) Since we see the world according to the stories we tell, when we tell a story in a given way, we will be likely to remember the facts in terms of the story we have told.

Linda Rising