Listening To Stories Quotes & Sayings

We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do. — Arthur Kleinman

I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous. — Laura Carmichael

Besides, static isn't so bad to listen to. Beats listening to your thoughts when your thoughts are a scramble of stories and you're having trouble telling what's real and what's a dream and what's a coincidence and what's basically what. — Aaron Starmer

For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories. — Tahir Shah

The important things that stay are the moments spent listening to people singing, telling stories, enjoying life. — Paulo Coelho

People grow up listening to all kinds of stories, but that doesn't mean they all want to spend their whole lives studying them. — Amy Reed

Faith comes from listening to the right stories. — Michael Gungor

At the end of the day, stories connect us, not politics. And there's so many stories out there waiting to be told. It's just a matter of who's out there listening. — Jose Antonio Vargas

We think we know our friends, our lovers, but really all we know is pieces of them. Fragments we learn by watching, sharing time and place, listening to their stories; over the years there are more and more of these fragments and we can draw lines between them, fill them with what we imagine is truth. But of course we only know what they show us; lines we think jig here may actually curl somewhere else altogether. The lines we draw aren't always real, and often have more to do with our own selves. — Elizabeth Joy Arnold

I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. — Gloria Steinem

We're supposed to take our problems to a family adviser. Personally, I've never met a family adviser. They're all off somewhere listening to dirty stories. — Robert Orben

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness. — Gloria Steinem

There are some stories, some memories, that if you tell them after dark, they seem to gain weight, substance, as if there are things listening, waiting to hear themselves spoken of again. Words have power. But even thinking about them is sometimes enough to make the air in a room heavy. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole. — Eudora Welty

I come from a family of Cherokee master storytellers. Listening to stories, reading them, and creating new tales is my life. These tales reveal the beauty and mystery of people's culture and beliefs. — Louise Ann Barton

While they'd be setting up shots, suddenly, there were 17 make-up chicks, just listening to Marlon telling these amazing stories that were probably lies. He was a fascinating individual. I learned a lot from him. — Johnny Depp

To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning. — Milan Kundera

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people's stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The common thread from all those stories was that talking helped, and listening, and time. One day I would find my own place. I couldn't run there, though, because it didn't exist yet; I had to build it myself, out of forgiveness, truth, and terrifying gestures of friendship. — I. W. Gregorio

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up. — Nick Earls

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky. — Stephen King

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here. — Judy Blunt

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy. — Nigel Hamilton

Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories. — Karen Armstrong

For no stories can live without children listening to them. — Fredrik Backman

[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories
entering into their feelings, validating their experiences
is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness. — William Deresiewicz

Wishbone

Half-eaten chicken
lying on white serving plate
quartered potatoes
chunks of carrots
celery too
we tell stories
and laugh about the day
your little finger is locked around the wishbone
so is mine
I pretend to make a wish
close my eyes
mumbling my lips
that's the way I faked out the nuns
pretending to say the rosary
so they would leave me alone
your face is so determined
you win the wrestling match
lifting your piece of chicken bone above your head
in victory
I know better than to ask
what did you wish for
secret desires of the heart are not to be shared
or
they won't come true
everyone knows that
you clean the dishes
I turn on the TV
lying on the couch
listening to you make music
with running water
and closing cupboard doors. — Robert Hobkirk

There is no right or wrong way to tell a story. You have to find your own way. You can get your idea from listening, looking, or imagining. Stories are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention. — Kate DiCamillo

Have you ever seen a child sitting on its mother's knee listening to fairy stories? As long as the child is told of cruel giants and of the terrible suffering of beautiful princesses, it holds its head up and its eyes open; but if the mother begins to speak of happiness and sunshine, the little one closes its eyes and falls asleep with its head against her breast ... I am a child like that, too. Others may like stories of flowers and sunshine; but I choose the dark nights and sad destinies. — Selma Lagerlof

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. — John Berger

I grew up listening to my grandfather's stories of our musical past. He would often talk about the orchestras that played at concerts and the musicians who played on Sunday evenings on street corners. By the time I grew up in the '80s, all of this was a thing of the past. I lived vicariously through his stories and often wondered what it would have felt like to have been part of his generation. — Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Thankful that I can share the disturbing stories in my brain with people."

"I have so many stories to tell you...of course that is if you plan on listening to them... — Kelly Fisher

It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, Listen to me. — Jhumpa Lahiri

When we spend time with people who live in extreme poverty, and we listen to their stories, it creates dignity and connectedness - something they usually lack. — Chris Marlow

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you've been listening to - all the pieces of music you've ever heard. — Brian Eno

Be wary of listening to stories secondhand. — Tim Allen

I kind of like that romantic image of being in a rocker with my family gathered around, all these generations in one room, listening intently to my stories. — Charlie Sheen

When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants. — Rachel Naomi Remen

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also. — Barbara Deming

Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other ... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone. — Mark Nepo

After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, "How can I tell whom not to trust?" the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy. — Martha Stout

Don't ever get to the point where you can't be taught because life is a classroom and everyone owns a pen. — Shannon L. Alder

You don't really understand people until you hear their life story. If you know their stories, you grasp their history, their hurts, their hopes and aspirations. You put yourself in their shoes. And just by virtue of listening and remembering what's important to them, you communicate that you care and desire to add value. — John C. Maxwell

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

No matter what album I've ever made or ever will work on, it's me trying to achieve this feeling I had listening to music when I was 8 years old. Just being mesmerized by the production and the mystique and the stories. — Jason Lytle

We question ourselves through others by way of stories, advice, and gestures; and we receive our answers form listening to others reactions — Jeremy Aldana

I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me. — David Levithan

I learned to love stories by listening to them. — John Dufresne

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged. — Susan Griffin

I started writing little short stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write. I think I was six years old. And then when I got to be eleven, twelve, and into my teens, I was just listening to records all the time, and I got a guitar. I started to take guitar lessons when I was twelve. — Lucinda Williams

A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme. — Italo Calvino

I was very fortunate that all my holidays I'd spend with my grandfather, experiencing a much more traditional way of life and listening to these wonderful stories, which I now feel are such an important part of Indian thinking. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I have mostly been terrified of listening to scary stories around a campfire. We camp a lot as a family, and at night my dad would try and tell us scary stories. This made eating s'mores difficult. The story would start with something like ... 'and the old man who lived in these woods ... ' I would then run back into the camper terrified. — Willow Shields

I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story. — Donald Miller

It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories. — Vanessa Kerry

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled. — John Allen Paulos

I was raised by my grandmother. She had a very difficult time, raised all her kids, my father and everybody. Listening to those stories and finding her so strong, poised. Anybody who came close to her was made to feel blessed. And at the same time, it didn't matter how strong a person was, in front of her, their head would go down. She carried through her life raising everybody. That is my model. — Rajashree Choudhury

For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name. — Mark Nepo

Because we fail to listen to each other's stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race. — Madeleine L'Engle

Uncle Wiggens ain't really my uncle, everyone just calls him that. He's over eighty and fought in the War Between the States. He only has one leg and one hero, General Robert E. Lee. Uncle Wiggens manages to work Lee's name into pretty much any old conversation. You might say, 'My, it's cold today,' and he'd reply, 'You think this is cold? General Lee said it didn't even qualify as chill till your breath froze on your nose and made a little icicle.' He had about five different stories of how he lost his leg, every one of them entertaining.
That night I was listening to the version that involved him running five Yankees into a bear's den. — Kristin Levine

He had entered sleep's antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories; yet part of him was still in the car, listening to the rain. — Justin Cronin

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination
and therefore fiction
is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves. — Aleksandar Hemon

More than reading - much more than reading, in fact - I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art. — Robert Kurson

Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them. — George MacDonald

Isn't it boring ... how people always want to tell you their own stories instead of listening to yours? I suppose that's why psychiatrists are better than friends; the paid listener doesn't interrupt with his own experiences. — Helen Van Slyke

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you'll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what's ahead when there's a well-rounded script inside your head. — Charles Duhigg

I love to work out and really enjoy the outdoors. I like to immerse myself with sport-related activities and spending quality time with people. I find people to be very inspiring, and I get a lot of motivation from listening and interacting with them, sharing stories and similarities - and differences - in our lives, and learning from each other. — Apolo Ohno

A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true. — Neil Gaiman

I'm not ashamed, or embarrassed. I'm happy that I grew up listening to gospel music and came from where I came from. I feel like I have a history and a story. That's what I am and that's what I'll always be from. I was never running away from it. — Katy Perry

Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence. — Michael Ondaatje

I just couldn't stand it any more back in Bes Pelargic,' Twoflower went on blithely, 'sitting at a desk all day, just adding up columns of figures, just a pension to look forward to at the end of it ... where's the romance in that? Twoflower, I thought, it's now or never. You don't just have to listen to stories. You can go there. Now's the time to stop hanging around the docks listening to sailors' tales. — Terry Pratchett

Tessa had lain down beside him and slid her arm beneath his head, and put her head on his chest,listening to the ever-weakening beat of his heart. And in the shadows they'd whispered, reminding each other of the stories only they knew. Of the girl who had hit over the head with a water jug the boy who had come to rescue her, and how he had fallen in love with her in that instant. Of a ballroom and a balcony and the moon sailing like a ship untethered through the sky. Of the flutter of the wings of the clockwork Angel. Of holy water and blood. — Cassandra Clare

We have different experiences, but trans women have experiences that do parallel with the whole fabric of what womanhood is. Embracing trans women, listening to their stories, enriches what womanhood is. It expands it and makes it even better. — Janet Mock

The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are. — Flemming Rose

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. — Sarah Hall

Children crave routine and find listening to the same stories over and over again soothing. If you've grown weary of the holiday books you've read your kid 7,883 times, try adding 'dude' to the end of every line of dialogue. — Adam Mansbach

After listening to hundreds and hundreds of [people's] stories over the last twenty years, I think I would have to say that most people do not recognize the strength of the life force in them or the many ways that it shows itself to them...So when people first come, this is the place we usually start - talking about life itself, our attitude toward it, our experience of it, our trust or distrust of it. Developing an eye to see it, in others and in ourselves. In the beginning is the life force. After more than fifty years of living, I have learned it can be trusted. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer's desire. — Gloria Steinem

All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth") — Davis Grubb

I do find that if I go out for a meal I can be listening to a few conversations at once all around me. It can drive my partner bonkers a little bit. But it's about being able to tell a lot of very different stories as well as you can and I do genuinely love what I do. — Christine Bottomley

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey, though she said she was amazed to find out that, besides being a bird, Turkey is also a country. Did you see that all over the Internet today? While Sarah Palin was pardoning a turkey, right behind her was a guy slaughtering turkeys. But, see, like most Internet stories, a little half-true. Turns out that, after a couple of minutes listening to Sarah Palin's voice, the turkeys said 'Kill us now.' — Jay Leno

The question "Who am I?" really asks, "Where do I belong or fit?" We get the sense of that "direction" -- the sense of moving toward the place where we fit, or of shaping the place toward which we are moving so that it will fit us -- from hearing how others have handled or are attempting to handle similar (but never exactly the same) situations. We learn by listening to their stories, by hearing how they came (or failed) to belong or fit. — Ernest Kurtz

Every day of my life is going out in public and seeing people's lives and listening to stories - all that kind of stuff musically inspires me. — LeAnn Rimes

Listening to others does not mean you should sound like them; find your own voice by telling stories as authentically as possible. — Carmen Agra Deedy

We are opinionated society. We're very happy to spout forth our own views; we're not good about listening. We have to listen to other's stories. Learn to listen to the stories of the terrorists just as we hope that they will listen to ours because very often these narratives express frustrations, fears, and anxieties that most societies can safely ignore. — Karen Armstrong

These nights are endless, and a man can sleep through them,
or he can enjoy listening to stories, and you have no need
to go to bed before it is time. Too much sleep is only
a bore. And of the others, any one whose heart and spirit
urge him can go outside and sleep, and then, when the dawn shows,
breakfast first, then go out to tend the swine of our master.
But we two, sitting here in the shelter, eating and drinking,
shall entertain each other remembering and retelling
our sad sorrows. For afterwards a man who has suffered
much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows. — Homer

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity? — Karl Jacoby

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told. — John Crowley

Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths - paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation. — Arthur Kleinman

She was with her flying companion-her playmate. The one who was sacred to her, who was the other half of the mysteries of life for her. The one who would always be there for her, helping her, watching her back, picking her up when she fell down, listening to her stories-no matter how many times she told them. Loving her even when she was stupid. Understanding her without words. Being inside the innermost circle in her mind.
Her soulmate. — L.J.Smith

So from now on, screw "perfect." Forget for a while about what kind of person you want to be, and just be the best version of the person you are. Figure out which of your classmates you genuinely like (not who you want to like you), and get to know them by telling your own stories and listening to theirs. Hang out with the people you think are cool, not the people you'd like to be considered cool by. Do things because they interest you, not because they make you look interesting ... and then, take stock in a month and see whether you're not happier, healthier, and working on some actual friendships with other imperfect-but-lovely humans. — Kat Rosenfield

No story is more beautiful than the Gospel, even though it is a story full of pain and nails and hate and blood and sin and murder and betrayal and forsakenness and unimaginable agony and death. It is the story of what happens to the most beautiful thing, Perfect Love, when it enters our world: it comes to a Cross, to the crossroad between good and evil. All our most beautiful stories are like the Gospel: they are tragedies first, and then comedies; they are crosses and then crowns. They are crosses because they are conflicts between good and evil. That is the fundamental plot of every great story. To say "that story is beautiful" means "that story resembles the Gospel." If you are bored by the Gospel, that puts no black eye on the Gospel, but on you. Most likely, it means you have never listened to it. You must have heard it, but hearing is far from the same thing as listening ... — Peter Kreeft

The best way to make a long story short is to stop listening. — Evan Esar

When we don't tell those we love about what's really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories. — Sharon Salzberg

The thing is, I don't know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else's. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true. — Alberto Manguel

I was up until all hours of the night, listening to stories, meeting great old comedians. — Joely Fisher

I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I'd been dreaming of such adventures since I was small. Back then I'd believed in destiny, and believed in it absolutely, with every strand and fiber of my little kid heart. I'd felt it like an itch in my chest while listening to my grandfather's extraordinary stories. "One day that will be me." What felt like obligation now had been a promise back then - that one day I would escape my little town and live an extraordinary life as he had done; and that one day, like Grandpa Portman, I would do something that mattered. — Ransom Riggs

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it? — Robin Epstein

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page.

They'll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang.

By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They'll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before.

It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher 'you are speaking gibberish' and the continental philosopher responds with 'exactly. — Chester Elijah Branch