“Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”
Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 361
“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
—
Diane Setterfield
,
book
The Thirteenth Tale
Source: The Thirteenth Tale
Last update June 3, 2021.
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Diane Setterfield 42
English novelist 1964Related quotes
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
Karen Blixen
(1885–1962) Danish writer
As quoted in The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. This appears as part of a statement in a 1957 interview where she speaks of a friend's comments about her:
I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
Paraphrased variant : All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.
“When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.”
Maurice Sendak
(1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books
Quoted in an interview, "Sendak on Sendak," Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (2007/2008)
Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 39-40)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 32 : Morning
Context: One of the ghosts — an old woman — beckoned, urging her to come close.
Then she spoke, and Mary heard her say:
"Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories."
That was all, and then she was gone. It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we’ve unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep. It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, the night picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the open air. The dream was gone.
All that was left was the sweetness of that feeling, and the injunction to tell them stories.
