A Quote by Russell Banks

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history. — © Russell Banks
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.
Because there is less female storytelling, especially motherhood storytelling, there has been immense pressure on my storytelling to represent more people, and to do so in a sort of unrealistic way.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Major Trends [is] the canonical modern work on the nature and history of Jewish mysticism. For a sophisticated understanding, not only of the dynamics of Jewish mysticism, but of the exquisite complexities of Jewish history and tradition, Major Trends is a major port of entry through which one must pass.
The journalist's first allegiance is to those who receive the work. Although there is no doubt that many owners and business managers of news organizations also have a deep allegiance to the public, that allegiance is necessarily alloyed with their concern for their own point of view or for the bottom line.
Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.
I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.
The oath of renunciation and allegiance is a solemn vow taken by thousands of immigrants each year to become a United States citizen. The oath is the fundamental statement of allegiance to the United States, and this allegiance is what unites America.
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.
The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.
In most countries, you have a monarch or some other principal person to whom its officers and its military swear their allegiance. Our officials in this country and our military swear allegiance to the Constitution. We say that when we say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.
We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.
I've always been drawn to storytelling, and acting is the most immersive form of storytelling you can get involved with! You're actually in the story when you're acting.
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