A Quote by Henry Louis Gates

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.

Henry Louis Gates

Quote Topics

About Change Existence Important Means Memories Nurture Other People Protect Stories Story Tell Things Things Change Will Your

Quote Author

Henry Louis Gates
American - Critic
Born: September 16, 1950

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

Henry Louis Gates

When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.

Theodora Goss

I think a lot of things are written from experience, but then you become a writer and talk about other people's experience and you tell stories. I mean, you can't just tell your own story all the time.

Eddie Vedder

Tell your story: yes, tell your story! Give your example. Tell everyone that it's possible, and other people will then have the courage to face their own mountains.

Paulo Coelho

It's important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story

Iyanla Vanzant

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

Maya Angelou

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

Adam Johnson

I'm very grateful to be in a position now where I have a lot more control to tell the stories I want to tell. I feel no obligation to tell any one story. I will tell you my interest mostly lies in telling stories about empowered women, but I don't feel it's an obligation. But I do feel like I am servicing a voice.

Elizabeth Banks

Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.

Donald Miller

I don't tell a story unless I have a very deep bench. If you tell an idiosyncratic story, there's no resonance. People read it and say, "I don't see anyone like that." So I tell a story only when I have many stories behind it.

Sherry Turkle

I don't have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I'm alive and I'm living and I'm experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.

Gabriel Iglesias

There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

Eleanor Brown

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

Chuck Palahniuk

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Richard Linklater

People don't change very much, and the things life ends up being about don't change from generation to generation. Life is about love. And people's stories don't really change. Your environment changes dramatically, technology changes, but people don't change, in the way our minds work.