A Quote by Tina Turner
As a child my grandmother used to tell us stories about the dead and the mystical.
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Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."
My grandmother's grandparents were slaves. My grandmother Big Mama would tell me about the stories she heard as a child growing up in the shadows of a North Carolina plantation. It's only been in my lifetime that blacks have had the right to vote, live in certain areas or hold certain jobs. It is with this black history that I write about the financial challenges African-Americans still have.
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.
Each of us is comprised of stories, stories not only about ourselves but stories about ancestors we never knew and people we've never met. We have stories we love to tell and stories we have never told anyone. The extent to which others know us is determined by the stories we choose to share. We extend a deep trust to someone when we say, "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone." Sharing stories creates trust because through stories we come to a recognition of how much we have in common.
I used to tell really boring stories as a child, about my toy panda's nose falling off, or something equally dull.
I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.
The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.
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.
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
Before we left, Grandmother talked a lot about the arctic night we would fly through. 'Isn't it a mystical word, "arctic"? Pure and quite hard. And meridians. Isn't that pretty? We're going to fly along them, faster than the light can follow us... Time won't be able to catch us.
My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'
I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.
You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?
The Anansi stories were in my life because they're not just 'Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby in the Briar Patch,' they're stories from Jamaica and Africa that my mum used to tell us when we were kids. So I learned about Anansi being not just a spider, but also a weird god-like figure since I was little.
The stories we tell each other and the stories we tell about heroism, about magic, about faith - those things say a lot about who we are and the kind of lessons that we wanna convey to our children.
I used to wonder, when my grandmother would tell me what the wolf said to the jackal, how these animals can talk. And, she would say, 'in my stories, animals talk. Shut up and listen.'
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