Tellers Quotes & Sayings

Our stories are the tellers of us. — Chris Cleave

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly. — Richard Greenberg

. Despite the considerable horror they had felt when the SA men were bellowing crude anti-Semitic slogans, in retrospect the joke-tellers were very much aware of the boycott's inherent absurdity:
A city on the Rhine during the boycott: SA men stand in front of Jewish businesses and "warn" passers-by against entering them. Nonetheless, a woman tries to go into a knitting shop.
An SA man stops her and says, "Hey, you. Stay outside. That's a Jewish shop!"
"So?" replies the woman. "I'm Jewish myself."
The SA man pushes her back. "Anyone can say that! — Rudolph Herzog

The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up meat attractive to flies. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Happiness has no history and the story tellers of all lands have understood this so well that the words "they are happy" are the end pf every love tale. — Honore De Balzac

Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers, story-tellers, singers of songs. — Pam Brown

In Miamis fariy tales are still produced around the clock, lovingly handmade one by one, and only the very very finest of them are exported. Most are only told once and then they fall flat on the ground, but the best and most beautiful of them rise from the lips of their tellers after the last words have been spoken, and then slowly hover off over the heads of the listeners, like small, shimmering paper lanterns. — Fredrik Backman

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
(A Teller of Tales) — W.B.Yeats

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own. — Haniel Long

And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them. — John Steinbeck

In almost any change there is 20 - 60 - 20. 20% are doing the change and we need to stay out of their way. 20% will never get there (a large percent still go into banks to see tellers vs. ATMs). 60% are in the middle. I think you will always find some companies where the head of HR is not a member of senior management team (bottom 20% and some companies where she or he has always been (top 20%). — Dave Ulrich

Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide. — Richard Brautigan

No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king. — Diana Gabaldon

My father was the king of the joke-tellers. I was so impressed as a child watching him, holding people in rapt attention. — Carol Leifer

Library events scare me, as they provide refuge for local historians, fabulists, tellers of tall tales, historical reenactors, and even dream weavers. Not to mention the single most feared creature on the planet: the self-published poet — Joe Queenan

The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty — Mark Twain

The evolution of the human brain is inextricably interwoven with the expansion of culture and the emergence of language. Thus, it is no coincidence that human beings are story tellers. Through countless generations, humans have gathered to listen to stories of the hunt, the exploits of their ancestors, and morality tales of good and evil...Thus, I believe that both the urge to tell a tale and our vulnerability to being captivate by one are deeply woven into the structures of our brains — Louis Cozolino

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? — Thomas Hardy

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. — William Gibson

The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application. — Joseph Epstein

They usually have two tellers in my local bank, except when it's very busy, when they have one. — Rita Rudner

We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. — Warren Buffett

There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there were actually colored windows at the post office in, for example, Pensacola, Florida. And there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. And there were separate windows where white people and black people would go to get their license plates in Indianola, Mississippi. And there were even separate tellers to make your deposits at the First National Bank in Atlanta. — Isabel Wilkerson

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHECKLIST If we want our kids to have a shot at making it in the world as eighteen-year-olds, without the umbilical cord of the cell phone being their go-to solution in all manner of things, they're going to need a set of basic life skills. Based upon my observations as dean, and the advice of parents and educators around the country, here are some examples of practical things they'll need to know how to do before they go to college - and here are the crutches that are currently hindering them from standing up on their own two feet: 1. An eighteen-year-old must be able to talk to strangers - faculty, deans, advisers, landlords, store clerks, human resource managers, coworkers, bank tellers, health care providers, bus drivers, mechanics - in the real world. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years. — Thomas Boswell

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty. — Daniel Kahneman

Fortune tellers live in the future. So do people who want to put things off.
So do fundamentalists. — Ed Seykota

Doctors are not fortune tellers, and neither am I. Having lived with disability since birth does not afford me immunity from illness. — Stella Young

It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it - I act. And I always get what I want. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper. — William Golding

In Africa it's difficult to carry the money, it's difficult to have a banking system with tellers, with distribution of cash. So they are using their mobile phones. — Maurice Levy

We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it. — Thomas C. Foster

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response. — Bell Hooks

Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English, I, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles - a, an, the - do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners. — James W. Pennebaker

I have found that liars in the end communicate more truth than do truth tellers." "How's that?" "Because truth is the safest lie. — Douglas Preston

I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect. — Kate Grenville

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers. — Viola Davis

'Tell to Win' reveals the key elements that tellers of purposeful stories utilize to engage their listeners and turn them into viral advocates of the tellers' goals. — Peter Guber

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139). — Maggie Nelson

Chase pointed at the tellers behind the glass. "First, you keep your hands in plain view. If you hit any alarm button, silent or otherwise, everyone out here is dead. — Grand Central Publishing

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers ... well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. — Dean Koontz

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. — W.B.Yeats

Most of the world's ills, it seemed to him, were caused by men who believed themselves important: on a good day it always ended in tears, on a bad day in global destruction. Oliver was not a man to start a war or provoke pestilence: his icons were the makers of music, the tellers of tales, the clowns and the balladeers, and all who celebrated life's footnotes, appendices and afterthoughts.
Little Brown, London, 1994. — Alan Plater

Everybody thinks they're a prophet. They must, or nobody would get married. Or maybe at a 50% divorce rate, only half the people are fortune tellers. Probably the men. — Jarod Kintz

For all the popularity of spiritual advisers in South Korea, it still shocks to see the leaders of huge public companies relying on fortune-tellers. A shaman may advise a struggling executive to move a building's front entrance, tapping the widespread pungsu belief that your luck depends on the direction of your house. — Kim Young-ha

We have already shown by references to the contemporary drama that the plea of custom is not sufficient to explain Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, but if we widen our survey to the entire field of English letters in his day, we shall see that he was running counter to all the best traditions of our literature. From the time of Piers Plowman down, the peasant had stood high with the great writers of poetry and prose alike. Chaucer's famous circle of story-tellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark was eminently democratic. — William Shakespeare

The only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. they loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he's just a bum, but who ain't? — William Kennedy

Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind
for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper ... No, the fault lies with the artists ... The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king ... Liars? ... or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster? — Diana Gabaldon

Sometimes on the bridge of his flagship, Beatty would release his inner tension by making faces. "For no apparent reason," said an officer who served with him, "he would screw his face into a fearsome grimace and hold it quite unconsciously for a minute or two." Another peculiarity was his addiction to fortune-tellers: a Mrs. Robinson, a Madame Dubois, and, in Edinburgh when he commanded the Grand Fleet, a "Josephine. — Robert K. Massie

My kind has become the the centerpiece for horror stories and legends across the globe, and society has labeled the vampire as a monster, but the creature peering from beneath the fog misted top hat that night was a monster that would surpass the wildest imaginations of the most skilled story tellers. And he was a human being. — Wayne Barrett

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins. — Sonia Rumzi

We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
from a preface to
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Augusta Gregory — W.B.Yeats

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers. — Kate Bernheimer

Joe knew what the nod meant-this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesman of the world, the truck drivers, and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and realtors would never know. Moments in a world without nets-none to catch you and none to envelop you. Joe looked at Dion and recalled what he'd felt after the first time they'd knocked over that newsstand on Bowdoin Street when they were thirteen years old, We will probably die young. — Dennis Lehane

People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. — Neil Gaiman

We need the bible if we are to be competent Christians. The Bible will build us up so that we can endure suffering. It will give us discernment for difficult choices. It will make us strong enough to be patient with others and patient enough to respond with kindness when others hurt us. The Bible will get us up to bring meals to new moms and pray for people on their hospital beds. The bible equips us to be truth lovers and truth tellers. It sens us out to care for the poor and welcome the stranger. There is no limit on what the Bible can do for us, to us and through us. — Kevin DeYoung

Just as bank tellers need a thorough knowledge of legitimate currency in order to spot counterfeit bills, so Christians need a thorough knowledge of the Bible in order to spot bogus religious teachings. How grounded are you in the Scriptures? How deep are your theological roots? How capable are you of detecting false teachings? — Charles R. Swindoll

The weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; — Joseph Conrad

The poet's role has changed over the centuries, the ages. The poets, the griots, used to be the keepers of the facts; they were the story tellers, and the stories were allegorically written truths: where we came from, how we migrated over this river, got with this tribe, became this nation, and tamed the mountains. It changed from that to being purely entertainment. And once it became purely entertainment, it lost something. — Malik Yusef

One ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking - some 500,000 people - lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines. — Alain De Botton

"Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry. — Bruce Sterling

The founders of modern Burma believed that they could guarantee prosperity and happiness by correctly choosing the moment for the rebirth of our country. They consulted astrologists and fortune-tellers, men of impeccable behaviour and uncontested wisdom, who were devout Buddhists to boot. Acting on the advice of these holy arithmeticians, they declared independence on the fourth of January in the year 1948, at twenty past four in the morning. Every year since then, we have commemorated that happy occasion on that day at that same impossible hour - in the full awareness that independence has caused more misfortune than all of the oppression and exploitation of the entire colonial period put together. — Karel Glastra Van Loon

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. — Anne Thaxter Eaton

Well, the Story Girl was right. There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way — L.M. Montgomery

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable
and therefore not significant. — Mary Lascelles

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. — Chris Cleave

The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper - often only a spark - to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer - have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity - its poets, seers and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers, and without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark. — Plato

By the time we landed in the hospital, most of our families considered us insensitive liars, but we didn't start out that way. We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating "I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm fine!" and we fund ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: "Actually, I'm not fine. — Glennon Doyle Melton

All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm. — Robert Anton Wilson

They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously. — Robert Dunbar

There is a myth that the purpose of education is to give one the means for upward mobility and success. The plain truth is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need desperately more peacemakers, healers, restorers, story tellers, and lovers of every shape and form. — David W. Orr

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. — Karl Kraus

It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. — Lewis H. Lapham

There is a saving grace in truth which helps truth-tellers through the worst of their troubles, and Katy found this out now. — Susan Coolidge

Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about. — David Graeber

My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day. — Meg Cabot

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing. — Alan Lightman

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. — Patrick Ness

Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee — Chris Cleave

My family were great story-tellers. My mum was one of 12 and they were all fighting to tell stories. You have to tell a good tale or no one is going to listen. You have to make it entertaining and interesting. That's how I learned to tell stories. — Denise Mina

The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We are all tellers of tales, and we seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives. Starting in late adolescence, we manufacture our dramatic personal myths by selectively mining some experiences and neglecting or forgetting others. — Dan P. McAdams

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same. — The Weeknd

Several Mohammedan countries in North Africa and the Middle East are precisely in a period of fourteenth-century development and can show us, in a number of respects, a reflection of what the European medieval world was like. Similar towns, their houses piled one upon another, narrow swarming streets, enclosing a few sumptuous palaces; the same extremes of appalling misery among the poor and of opulence among great lords; the same story-tellers at the corners of the streets, propagating both myths and news; the same population, nine-tenths illiterate, submitting through long years to oppression and then suddenly rebelling violently in murderous panic; the same influence of religious conscience upon public affairs; the same fanaticism; the same intrigues among the powerful; the same hate among rival factions; the same plots so curiously ravelled that their solution lies only in the spilling of blood! — Maurice Druon

Critics become criminals since truth is anathema to an empire or any authoritarian government that depends on lies for its existence. The informant who provides the people with the truth cannot be protected by whistle-blower laws or the Constitution. It is the truth-tellers who are sent to prison or are killed while those who undermine our Constitution are promoted. This lasts until the corrupt government is dismantled. — Ron Paul

My grandfather was a faith healer and medium, and he always encouraged faith in the unseen. I believe in fortune tellers. — Luke Goss

Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers. — George Bernard Shaw

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. — Walter Benjamin

We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good. — Warren Buffett

I'm a dinosaur, he thought, lumbering through a world where truthtellers
are despised. — Tess Gerritsen

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals. — Philip Pullman

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers. — Kate Forsyth

Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims. — Jostein Gaarder

We all have defining moments. It is in these moments that we find our true characters. We become heroes or cowards; truth tellers or liars; we go forward or we go backward. — Robert Kiyosaki

There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland. — L.M. Montgomery

We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator. He was and is a million different things, but in the beginning, he was a creator. That means something for us, I think. We were made to be the things that he is: forgivers, redeemers, second chance-givers, truth-tellers, hope-bringers. And we were certainly, absolutely, made to be creators. — Shauna Niequist

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along. — Bill Cosby

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God. — N. T. Wright