Storyteller Quotes in

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Storyteller Quotes:

  • [first lines]

    Storyteller: Scientists and dreamers, they travel the world with watchful eyes, and guzzle hope like water. Their journeys were separate, but their purpose was common - to map the world. One begged for money and pencils. Another tore his shirt to strips, carefully wrapping his shredded feet. Yet another, thirsty, near starving, suckled the sap from plants. None had an easy road.

    Storyteller: Though utterly dependent on one another, most found the other's maps unsettling. They denied one's perspective by charting the land incomprehensibly, calling into question one's very being. Still, when they met on the lonely roads, the explorers would present one another with their maps. Some seemed to say so plainly, directly, the world is like *this*. Others were more oblique; skating, impressionistic, unstable. They froze mere slivers of the infinite earth as is skittered by in orbit. If ever these maps could be gathered together, they would comprise an atlas of unsettling vision. A final proof that truth is conjecture.

  • Storyteller: The astronomer carries a veil of pure darkness. Dawn is a disorienting agent, he says. The stars are there all the time. He embroiders maps on massive blankets threaded with spider webs and cocoon casings. Gemstones form planets. Satin tassels are meteors. He builds a dome over the turf to trap the darkness, marking the circle of horizon, then lashing sticks to form a frame. Over this he carefully drapes his heavy black blankets, painstakingly pierced with April's constellations. When it rains, the stars strip into shining puddles on the Earth. The needle grows slick and dangerous in his hand.

  • [last lines]

    Storyteller: One famous month, the explorers gathered together to map the same difficult terrain. They were utterly dependent on one another to survive. They struggled with the unusual proximity. Each evening they made their maps while sitting on the ground, backs to the fire, elbows crooked over their papers. The flames shrunk in the cruel lands they came to. And the explorers, used to cold hands and faces, now worked with cold back as well.

    Storyteller: As the journey eked on they took to walking in an outward-facing circle, taking turns moving forward, backwards, and sideways. With supplies supportability low, the direction wheel whirled into a small unnamed town where it finally spun out and scattered. The small plot of land in which they had arrived was fenced off. It remains blank on every globe, every atlas, in every roaming heart.

  • Storyteller: The light captain travels the land as points of light. His voyage is possessed the effortless speed of planetary orbit. He makes it possible to slip into darkness like slamming a door. His maps are like snapshots taken in cruel flashes of light. There's no room for ambiguity. The world exists in sharp plains. Mountains cast no shadows. Trees stand as still as dead stones.

    Storyteller: Sometimes he had with him his daughter, who looked only to the sides and never straight ahead. She missed the many slashes of land her father captured and froze. At night, around the fire, she drew her own maps, like a tunnel. Sky at the end, land down the sides. To the captain these were near simpleton drawings. She may as well have been screwing clouds into jars.

  • [first lines]

    Storyteller: Once upon a time, there was a quiet little village in the French countryside, whose people believed in Tranquilité - Tranquility.

    [Sunday morning congregation sings]

    Storyteller: If you lived in this village, you understood what was expected of you. You knew your place in the scheme of things. And if you happened to forget, someone would help remind you.

    [wife kicks sleeping husband in pew]

    Father Henri: The season of Lent is upon us. This is of course a time of abstinence. Hopefully also it's a time of reflection. Above all let this be for us a time... a time of sincere penitence. It is a time to stand up and be counted...

    Storyteller: In this village, if you saw something you weren't supposed to see, you learned to look the other way. If perchance your hopes had been disappointed, you learned never to ask for more. So, through good times and bad, famine and feast, the villagers held fast to their traditions. Until, one winter day, a sly wind blew in from the North...

  • Storyteller: But still the clever north wind was not satisfied. It spoke to Vianne of towns yet to be visited, friends in need yet to be discovered, battles yet to be fought...

    [Vianne throws her mother's ashes to the wind]

    Storyteller: ...By someone else, next time.

  • Storyteller: Even the Comte de Reynaud felt strangely... released. Although it would take another six months for him to work up the courage to ask Caroline out to dinner.

  • Storyteller: Colt 45, single shot.You had to cock it every time you shot. It was called a peacemaker, but I haven't seen much peace that it brought.No, you guys today have that full automatic. Pull the trigger and spray. History's a funny thing. They said Columbus discovered America and the Indians were already here. That's like me telling you that I discovered your car. They call them evil red savages because they didn't give up the car soon enough. One thing about time. No matter how much or how little passes, it changes things. People forget their past. They forget the truth. But pictures don't lie. Forgotten gunslingers like Nat Love, Ison Dart, Cherokee Bill. And troops too, like the Ninth and the Tenth. See, people forget that almost one out of every three cowboys was black. Cos when the slaves were freed, a lot of them headed out west. Built their own towns. Shit. They didn't have much choice. In fact, over half the original settlers of Los Angeles were black. But for some reason, we never hear their stories. Stories like Jessie Lee and his posse.

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