A Quote by Roger Ross Williams

It is our stories [classic Disney films] that make us human - so Owen [Suskind] has become an expert in what connects us and makes us human. That got to me, the power of these stories, and the lessons these tales give us to create the connection between us.

Roger Ross Williams

Quote Topics

Become Between Classic Connection Connects Create Disney Disney Film Expert Films Give Got Human Lessons Make Makes Me Our Power Stories Tales Us

Quote Author

Roger Ross Williams
American - Producer
Born: September 16, 1970

I realized that Owen [Suskind] is completely brilliant, because he embraced and memorized all these classic Disney films - these fables that chronicle the hero's journey, and have existed for thousands of years. Owen, in a sense, grew up on a diet of myth and fable, and has become an expert on their themes, which contain a moral guide that connects people.

Roger Ross Williams

I understood that the stories we believe have power over us. They work into our bodies and minds and change us from inside out. What if one day these stories become something stronger, more real, than fairy tales?

Danielle Trussoni

By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

That's the best thing that classic can do, is it can return to us from our own past to give us lessons about the future, and it can give us a sense of both who we were and who we could become.

Bartlett Sher

Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.

Tim O'Brien

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

Daniel Taylor

Art civilizes us and it connects us and activates us. And so it's really important to connect with compassion, with stories about people who are different from us.

Cate Blanchett

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.

Alan Lee

The least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful.... The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us.

Daniel Taylor

Seeing yourself reflected on screen is a very important part of being human. It makes us feel less alone, it make us feel more connected to humanity. Women, gay men, and trans people for a long time have not seen themselves represented, so being able to show the complexities that we all have - just as complex stories as a heterosexual white male - is crucial for us to feel more human and have other people see us as human beings.

Marielle Heller

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Doris Lessing

Our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

Frederick Buechner

What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? ...Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.

Kameron Hurley

Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives.

John Dickinson

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.