“Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”
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.
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Philip Pullman 161
English author 1946Related quotes
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
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.
“Don't let them tell us stories.”
"Entre oui et non" in L'Envers et l'endroit (1937), translated as "Between Yes and No", in World Review magazine (March 1950), also quoted in The Artist and Political Vision (1982) by Benjamin R. Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath
Context: Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.
On being able to tell different stories about the Korean American experience in “’So Many Stories to Tell’: A Conversation with Maurene Goo” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/so-many-stories-to-tell-a-conversation-with-maurene-goo/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Aug 22)
Travis Parker, Proloque, p. 1
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)
“Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.”
Source: Love Is a Mix Tape
