Quotations on listening and storytelling

Here are a few good quotations I've gathered over the years:

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. Hannah Arendt

If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. Barry Lopez, in Crow and Weasel

To speak is to sow, to listen is to reap. Turkish proverb

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song—but in this dance or in this song there are fulfulled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in our common destiny. Pablo Neruda

[T]he sound of story is the dominant sound of our life. Reynolds Price

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Karl Menninger

When the heart overflows, it comes out through the mouth. Ethiopian proverb

With me, it's story, story, story. Bernard Malamud

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep their eye on. Georg C. Lichtenberg