Friday Forays in Fiction: Quotes on Storytelling

Sacred stories are those of transformation, they are stories that draw us closer to what I call the Lord Within The Heart, and they help us to see our connection to all things. There’s a saying in the Jewish tradition that the shortest distance between [a hu]man and God is through a story. So if storytelling is a journey, sacred storytelling is a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage to a place called Hope.
 —Andy Fraenkel

It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical arguments, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.
—Madeleine L’Engle

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance ... Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer is seen standing alerted, the exclamation 'Ah!' may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.
—Joseph Campbell in "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion"