I will open my mouth in a parable I will utter dark sayings of old. Things that we have heard and known, that our fathers told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell it to the coming generations. – Bible
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
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, 1995, Introduction to The Dreamer Awakes by Alice Kane
Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011
