“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”

The Last Lecture (2008)

Travis Parker, Proloque, p. 1
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)

Variant: Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January
Nausea (1938)

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.

Human, All Too Human (1878)

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.

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 119