"Story-teller" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the construction of history in its complete sense. And this evidence, when subjected to judicious criticism, is trustworthy; for the ancient story-teller and poet reflects the customs and ideas and ideals of his own time, even though the combination of agencies and the preternatural proportions of the actors and their deeds belong to the imagination. The historian must know how to supplement and to give life and interest to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of Sher Singh's cause that for once he overbore the opposition of his Durbar. The Durbar considered that Partab Singh's recorded disinheritance of his elder son, and the presumed reasons for it, which were known by hearsay to every story-teller in Granthistan, were sufficient to bar his recognition as regent and heir presumptive; but Colonel Antony thought that the secrecy with which the Prince had been condemned, and the absence of any documentary evidence, rendered it extremely probable that his father had been ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... as fond of fairy stories as are any other children, and they are lucky in having a great number, for that famous story-teller, Hans Christian Andersen, was a Dane, and as the Danish language is very like the Norwegian, his stories were probably known in Norway long before they were known in England. But the Norwegians have plenty of other stories of their own, and they love to sit by the fire ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... story-tellers do, caught my eye, and straightway collapsed. There was a moment's awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man muttered something to the effect that he had "forgotten the rest," thereby sacrificing a reputation as a good story-teller which he had built up for six seasons past. I blessed him from the bottom of my heart, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... one in their club was crushed by having his tale received in dead silence. When it was finished one of the party would "ring the bell," and the circle order drinks at the expense of the man who had dared to amuse them. How the professional story-teller must have shuddered—he whose story never was ripe until it had been told a couple of hundred times, and who would produce a certain tale at a certain ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... The treatment of the supernatural may seem, to Occidental readers, rather daring and irreverent, but it is perfectly in harmony with the Russian peasant's anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and should be taken with due allowance for the educational limitations of the story-teller and his auditors. The Russian muzhik often brings God and the angels into his folk-tales, and does so without the least idea of treating them disrespectfully. He makes them talk in his own language because he has no other ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... "Well," the story-teller resumed, "the Indians who lived out in the woods, far from towns or cities, had to find all their own food. They caught fish, shot animals and birds, planted corn and gathered berries. Some of them they ate at once, but many of ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... some are purely imaginative, some authentic, not a few jotted down from oral narrative, or derived from the vague remembrance of some old play or adventure; but the form at least is my own, and that is about all that a professional story-teller, gleaning his matter at random, can generally ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... a story-teller may take of his business, 'tis happy when he can think, "This book of mine will please such and such a friend," and may set that friend's name after the title page. For even if to please (as some are ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... perhaps hardly say that many of the etymologies given in Irish sources are pure invention, stories being often made up to account for the names, the real meaning of which was unknown to the mediaeval story-teller or scribe. ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... Leighton writes many more boys' books of equal merit with The Wreck of the Golden Fleece, more than one hitherto popular story-teller will have to look to his ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... wanted to know about their friend's adventures. They were puzzled by the reserve of a man generally so talkative; on this occasion they had to drag the words out of his mouth; usually he was a ready story-teller, now he gave only evasive answers to the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that common ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... market" has possibilities in the hands of a skillful mother. The bedtime story is a definite institution in many families. It deserves to be so in all. Beginning with the nursery rimes, the stories will gradually broaden in theme, and if their dramatic possibilities are at all realized by the story-teller, the children will broaden in their conception of the lives and feelings of others. Sympathy will thus in most cases be a plant ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... again,—the old, old story of a quarrel between the father and the "baby" of his family, of the hasty leaving home of the boy, of the meagre news of his early marriage, and lastly of the years that were empty of tidings. These Polly was able to fill up in part, when the story-teller turned listener, with interest almost ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... novel, "Count Kostia," published in 1863. After that date his romances followed in quick succession. Embodying extravagant adventures, they must be classed nevertheless in the category of the sentimental novel to which the writings of Sand and Feuillet belong. Cherbuliez is always an interesting story-teller and an ingenious artificer of plot, but his psychology is conventional and his descriptive passages superficial though clever. "Samuel Brohl & Co.," published in 1877, illustrates his power of drawing cosmopolitan types, Russians, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was soon after I began collecting stones, i.e., when 9 or 10, that I distinctly recollect the desire I had of being able to know something about every pebble in front of the hall door—it was my earliest and only geological aspiration at that time. I was in those days a very great story-teller—for the pure pleasure of exciting attention and surprise. I stole fruit and hid it for these same motives, and injured trees by barking them for similar ends. I scarcely ever went out walking without saying I had seen a pheasant or some strange bird (natural history ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... away up the tree so fast. I'm not going to stay round here long enough to interfere with your looking over your spiritual wardrobe. I wonder if your soul wears soft gray fur?" And the story-teller walked quickly on through the woods, chanting to herself: "Old world, how beautiful thou art!" and planning for an unusually effective denouement for the tale of the Three ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... story-teller heard it, but with different results. The latter stirred and looked about him, as though new hope and strength had come to him. The former, led by Tim and Judy, broke simultaneously into anxious speech. Maria, having slept profoundly since the first mention of the mouse in its cosy pocket, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... looked grave, anxious, unhappy. She could not laugh. Tale after tale, jest after jest, fell from Wilhelm's lips. Such a story-teller never before sat at the Weitbreck board. The old kitchen never echoed ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... new and isolated corner of the earth. He had had an Indian wife in his youth; being more accustomed to the ways of her people than of his own. For nearly twenty years he had lived a thriftless, bachelor existence, known among men, and by hearsay among women, as a noted story-teller, and genial, devil-may-care, old mountain man, whose heart was in the right place, but who never drew very heavily upon his brain resources, except to embellish a tale of his early exploits in Indian-fighting, bear-killing and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... has that desire for a fundamental impulse. Art is selection, and upon the individual soul of the creative artist is laid the burden of choice. It is in the way he chooses his material and in the way he works it out that he is to be judged. He may be a story-teller like Stevenson, or he may be a novelist like Zangwill. All I ask of him is just simply this—he must be an individual creative artist; he must not repeat, must not imitate ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... use made of it by Cervantes in Don Quixote (Part I., chap. xx.) where Sancho relates it to beguile the hours of the memorable night when the noise of the fulling-mill so terrified the doughty knight and his squire. The version in the Disciplina Clericalis is as follows: A certain king had a story-teller who told him five stories every night. It happened once that the king, oppressed by cares of state, was unable to sleep, and asked for more than the usual number of stories. The story-teller related three ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... described which hardly one of his contemporaries would have thought worth a line of notice, we will here only mention the boat-race on the Lake of Bolsena. We are not able to detect from what old letter-writer or story-teller the impulse was derived to which we owe such lifelike pictures. Indeed, the whole spiritual communion between antiquity and the Renaissance is full of delicacy ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... boaster, He the marvelous story-teller, He the traveler and the talker, He the friend of old Nokomis, Made a bow for Hiawatha; From a branch of ash he made it, From an oak-bough made the arrows. Tipped with flint, and winged with feathers, And the cord he ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... bench, or perhaps stand up; which selects for another the choicest portions of the dishes upon the table, and uncomplainingly dines off what is left; which hears with smiling interest the well- worn anecdotes of the veteran story-teller; which gently lifts the little child, who has fallen, and comforts the sobbing grief and terror; which never forgets to endeavor to please others, and seems, at least, pleased with all efforts made to ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... Ward; what do you mean, you sneaking little tell-tale?' he exclaimed. 'No, you're worse than that, you are a right-down story-teller.' ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness will not prevent the unpremeditated betrayal of conditions, facts, and incidents, which help reconstruct the milieu; how much more, then, the unaffected simplicity of the born story-teller. I do not know how Froissart ranks as an authority with historians. I have not read him for years; and my recollections are chiefly those of childhood, with all the remoteness and all the vividness which memory preserves from early impressions. ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... ten years old, and some of his adventures had such a marvellous edge that I secretly wondered if Uncle Jesse were not drawing a rather long bow at our credulous expense. But in this, as I found later, I did him injustice. His tales were all literally true, and Uncle Jesse had the gift of the born story-teller, whereby "unhappy, far-off things" can be brought vividly before the hearer and made to live again ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and the Three Ghosts; in these spider-stories the insect, like the fox with us, is the most intelligent of animals (the late Rev. J. Zimmermann's Akra or Ga Grammar, Stuttgart, 1858). It is represented as speaking through the nose like the local 'bogy,' and its hobbling gait is imitated by the story-teller. Another superstition is that the Ananu (the Akra form of the word) injures children sleeping in the same room with it. At Fernando Po I found another valuable spider which preys upon cockroaches. When a cruiser was particularly afflicted by the blatta, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the great boaster, He the marvellous story-teller, He the friend of old Nokomis, Saw in all the eyes around him, Saw in all their looks and gestures, That the wedding guests assembled, Longed to hear his pleasant stories, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... shall come," added the story-teller, "when the words of the weird woman to Odin shall prove true; and Balder shall come again to rule over a newborn world in which there shall be no wrong-doing and no ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... these maidens are the descendants of those ravished by King Amangons and his men, and how, could the court of the Fisher King, and the Grail, once more be found, the land would again become fertile. Blihos-Bliheris is, we are told, so entrancing a story-teller that none at court could ever weary of listening to ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... her head being towards it!" said the story-teller with the ruined head, giving a knowing wink on the sound side ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... was large, had fallen into easy attitudes; an exciting game of drafts, or a story-teller, or a beauty, attracting groups here and there over ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... have indeed listened to many more stories than I have ventured here to insert; some I have rejected from the nature of their details, others from there being a strong impression on my mind that they were the extempore invention of the story-teller with a view to the rupee, which he feared he would not secure if he confessed he had nothing to relate. I have not perhaps been judicious in my selection of those which I hoped would amuse the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... you about that, youngster, though I ain't much of a story-teller. You just wait till I get my pipe filled, and I'll spin a yarn for you, as they used to say ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... follower of Johnson, a strenuous opponent of the new romanticism. The poetry of Cowper, an ardent lover of nature, whose first volume appeared in 1781, though usually conventional in expression, is always sincere and sometimes exquisite. Crabbe, a story-teller and preacher, wrote some true poetry, along with much that is prosaic: rarely moved by an inspiration drawn from nature to desert the conventional couplet, he nevertheless had something of the spirit of the new movement. In 1783 the artist-poet Blake began to write ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... come on a visit, and had carried the bright young sister off to Malta. She was a terrible loss to all the parish, and it would have been worse if Sophia had not grown up to take her place, and to be the great helper in the school and parish, as well as the story-teller and playmate, the ever ready "Aunt Sophy" of ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tumble-down hut a fire was blazing. Some men were squatted around a tripod which supported a large iron pot. One was speaking, and even Royson's untrained ear recognized the measured cadence of the story-teller. A rumble of laughter showed that the protest of some discomfited rogue or some wise moullah's saw had just tickled the audience when Abdullah leaped from the saddle and ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... the ever present love will greet him, he knows, with approval and pity; if he falls, plead for him; if he suffers, cheer him;—be with him and accompany him always until death is past; and sorrow and sin are no more. Is this mere dreaming, or, on the part of an idle story-teller, useless moralising? May not the man of the world take his moment, too, to be grave and thoughtful? Ask of your own hearts and memories, brother and sister, if we do not live in the dead; and (to speak reverently) prove ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could you ask?' I cried. 'Man, I've often thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... overhaul my reckoning, for I almost forget. Did ever any of you see a port-go-chaire?" "We never heard of such a port," said some of his auditors; "you're humbugging us." "I have been to America, the West and East Ingees, but I never heard of such a port," said another. "Why, you lubbers," said the story-teller, "if you go to France, you'll see thousands of them. It's what they drive the coaches under into their yards." I was inclined to correct the word, but I thought it better not to interrupt them. "Where ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... fragrant tobacco smoke. On a corner of the dining-room table, a game of poker was begun. One of the drivers, a Swede, produced an accordion; a group on the steps of the bunk-house listened, with alternate gravity and shouts of laughter, to the acknowledged story-teller of the gang. But soon the men began to turn in, stretching themselves at full length on the horse blankets in the racklike bunks. The sounds of heavy breathing increased steadily, lights were put out, and before the afterglow had faded from the sky, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... with it kindly. It is a story as told by a friend of us all, who is found in all parts of all countries, who is immoderately fond of a funny story, and who, unfortunately, attempts to tell a funny story himself—one that he has been particularly delighted with. Well, he is not a story-teller, and especially he is not a funny story-teller. His funny stories, indeed, are oftentimes touchingly pathetic. But to such a story as he tells, being a good-natured man and kindly disposed, we ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... principles contained in Mr. Mahaffy's clever little book, and many of them will, no doubt, commend themselves to our readers. The maxim, 'If you find the company dull, blame yourself,' seems to us somewhat optimistic, and we have no sympathy at all with the professional story-teller who is really a great bore at a dinner-table; but Mr. Mahaffy is quite right in insisting that no bright social intercourse is possible without equality, and it is no objection to his book to say that it will ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of the foremost orators in the Senate, but a delightful conversationalist, with an inexhaustible fund of reminiscence and anecdote. One of his colleagues in the House of Representatives, Mr. Warren R. Davis, of the Pendleton district, was equally famed as a story-teller, and when they met at a social board they monopolized the conversation, to the delight of the other guests, who listened with attention and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... dozen of them at the same time to the post-office or the country store, he was able, according to his years, to add his full share to the gaiety of the company. By reason of his reading and his excellent memory, he soon became the best story-teller among his companions; and even the slight training gained from his studies greatly broadened and strengthened the strong reasoning faculty with which he had been gifted by nature. His wit might be mischievous, but it was never malicious, and his nonsense was never ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement of the hand, the glow of the color, that were in due time to ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sofa. Grushenka had grown used to him, and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun to visit in prison before she was really well) she would sit down and begin talking to "Maximushka" about trifling matters, to keep her from thinking of her sorrow. The old man turned out to be a good story-teller on occasions, so that at last he became necessary to her. Grushenka saw scarcely any one else beside Alyosha, who did not come every day and never stayed long. Her old merchant lay seriously ill at this time, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... talent was that of their younger contemporary J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The author of Uncle Silas had plenty of solid power; but his art was too highly specialised. No one ever succeeded better in two main objects of the story-teller; first, in exciting interest, in stimulating curiosity by vague hints of some dreadful mystery; and then in concentrating attention upon a dramatic scene. It is true that, although an Irishman, he gained ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... just telling us about a donkey-boy she had in Galway last summer," Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again. Lord Westmere stroked his long white mustache with his bloodless hand and looked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was a good story-teller. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, as if she had alighted there for a moment only. Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath for her slender, supple figure, and its delicate color suited ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller may all along have meant nothing but what he said; and that, incredible as the events may appear, he himself literally believed—and expected you also to believe—all this about Hercules, without any ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... occasion, to make fast their roaming thoughts by help of a good yarn, when it could be got. There were plenty of individuals, amongst a crew of forty, calculated by their experience, or else by their flow of spirits, and fancy, to spin it. Each watch into which they were divided had its especial story-teller, with whose merits it twitted the other, and on opportunity of a general reunion, they were pitted against one another like two fighting-cocks, or a couple of rival novelists in more polished literary society at home. The one was a grave, solemn old North-Sea whaler with one ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... race. Her tales were of the kindergarten, happenings in her life and the lives of others, and I have sought to set them down as she told them to me in her quaint, broken English. But they miss the earnest eyes and dramatic gestures of the little story-teller as she sat in the glow of the hibachi fire, with a background of paper doors, with shadow pictures of pine-trees and bamboo etched by the moonlight, the far-off song of a nightingale, and the air sweet with incense from ...
— Mr. Bamboo and the Honorable Little God - A Christmas Story • Fannie C. Macaulay
... tale of The Talking Doll while they walked their horses through a favorite wood-road, Mr. Evringham keeping his eyes on the animated face of the story-teller. His own was entirely impassive, but he threw in an exclamation now and then to prove ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... curiously enough, his grandmother was a housekeeper at Crewe Hall, where my mother was born, and I have often heard her say that the greatest treat that could be given her and her brother and sister was an afternoon in the housekeeper's room at Crewe, for Mrs. Dickens was a splendid story-teller, and used to love to gather the children round her and tell them fairy stories. And so it was only natural that my mother should feel a special interest in Charles Dickens, when she came to know him in after life. I believe that the very last time that he ever dined out ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... what he precisely meant by the last reference to herself. For as he leaned complacently back in his seat, anger against him flamed suddenly hot in her. Occupied by his story, she had ceased to take stock of the story-teller. Now that he had ended, she looked him over from head to foot. An obstinate stupidity was the mark of the man to her eye. How dare he sit in judgment upon the meanest of his fellows, let alone Harry Feversham? she asked, and in the same moment recollected that ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... thought of the particular lives in which the wider interest of the book (as I take it to be) is firmly lodged. From a huge emotion that reaches us through the youth exposed to it, the war is changed into an emotion of our own. It is rendered by the story-teller, on the whole, as a scene directly faced by himself, instead of being reflected in the experience of the rising generation. It is true that Tolstoy's good instinct guides him ever and again away from the mere telling of the story on ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... prove a poor story-teller," replied Monsieur Dorlange. "I have spent all my fire this very day in telling ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the Panathenaea, Bias, servant of Democrates, had supped with Phormio,—for in democratic Athens a humble citizen would not disdain to entertain even a slave. The Thracian had a merry wit and a story-teller's gift that more than paid for the supper of barley-porridge and salt mackerel, and after the viands had disappeared was ready even to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... seekest." So the messenger kissed his hands and joyful and happy returned to his lodging, where he laid an hundred and ten dinars[FN351] in a purse he had by him. As soon as morning morrowed, he donned his clothes and taking the dinars, repaired to the story-teller, whom he found seated at the door of his house. So he saluted him and the other returned his salam. Then he gave him the gold and the old man took it and carrying the messenger into his house made him sit down in a convenient ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... spirit to bridge the gaps in its disjointed experience, and to link together in a kind of mental mosaic the otherwise isolated incidents in the facts of daily life and the rumours and traditions that have been handed down from the story-teller's predecessors. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... many moons hence, to use the language of our story-teller, if she continues as elusive as the wind. I have had glimpses of her, or rather of the flutter of her vanishing raiment. A being with a wonderfully perfect face, clothed in heterogeneous and many-coloured ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... refuted the purblind purists, the chilly "wet-blankets"; and the Lincoln stories, bright, penetrative, piquant, and pertinent are our classics. Hand in hand with "Father Abraham," the President next to Washington in greatness, walks "Old Abe, the Story-teller." ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... as a story-teller at his best.... The drawings possess the uncommon merit of really illustrating ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... with a company of immigrants, could tell you things about our ancestors that would make you feel as if we came up out of the Irish hills. And great-grandfather, he actually looked legendary himself. Why, do you know, he came over with these people to be their story-teller!" ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... stands out in your memory of childhood? In what degree is this due to the art of the story-teller or the reader? to the character ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... become a good story-teller. This requires a good voice, animated gesture and facial expression, a good command of English words, power of graphic description and narration, restraint from digression and superfluous detail, and concentration of aim upon some ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... and, dismissing the subject with airiness somewhat exaggerated, drew out his huge gilt snuffbox. The snow was now falling more thickly, drawing a white and fleecy veil between the two upon the road and the story-teller and his audience beneath the distant elm. "Are you for Williamsburgh?" demanded the Highlander, when he had somewhat abruptly declined to take snuff with ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... from the pick-handle beating, Roger Vanderwater took me out of the slave pen and tried to make various better things out of me. I might have become an overseer in Hell's Bottom, but I chose to become a story-teller, wandering over the land and getting close to my brothers, the slaves, everywhere. And I tell you stories like this, secretly, knowing that you will not betray me; for if you did, you know as well as I that my ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... has the true story-teller's art. He arrests attention at the outset, and he retains it to ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... found himself in the Oak Chair. "Very true," said the next man to the left. "Cuiridh an teanga snaim nach t-fhuasgail an fhiacaill"—(The tongue will tie a knot which the tooth cannot loosen). "Let some one give us a story." "Cha robh sgialach nach robh briagach"—(He who is a good story-teller is also a good retailer of lies), says Callum a Ghlinne, or Malcolm of the Glen, an excellent story-teller when he liked. "I'll give you a riddle though, and perhaps we may get a sgeulachd from the stranger, the gentleman, on my left," "An rud nach eil 's nach robh, 's nach bi' sin do laimh 'us ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... of fitting language to thought is marked. It made him the matchless story-teller, and gave sublimity to his graver addresses. His thoroughness and accuracy were a source of wonder and delight to scholars. He had a masterful grasp of great subjects. He was able to look at events from all sides, so as to ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... it? He has a tongue. Why shouldn't he tell us something? I want to judge whether he is a good story-teller; anything you like, prince-how you liked Switzerland, what was your first impression, anything. You'll see, he'll begin directly and tell us ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to me to be Maupassant, the novelist, a story-teller, a writer, and a philosopher by turns. I will add one more trait; he was devoid of all spirit of criticism. When he essays to demolish a theory, one is amazed to find in this great, clear writer such lack ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... called the girl to her and pointed out the shepherds and shepherdesses carved on the white Italian marble of the fireplace; she invented a little story about them to amuse the child, while the mother stood by and at the end thanked the story-teller with more enthusiasm than seemed called for. Mrs. Lee did not fancy her effusive manner, or her complexion, and was glad when Dunbeg appeared ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... story-teller; after I had acquired language he used to spell clumsily into my hand his cleverest anecdotes, and nothing pleased him more than to have me repeat them at an ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... put it away in the bottom of my trunk. The seventh rejection convinces me that I am not a story-teller." ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... They were still unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew, with an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... children and sometimes for philosophers,' as Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but at the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this subject. No doubt his profession as a reciter and story-teller prevented him. We can see that Thucydides was sceptical; but can we fully see what his scepticism was directed against, or where, for instance, Nikias would have disagreed with him, and where he and Nikias ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... wit shall hang at every lord,' So sung Dan Pope; but 'pon my word, He was a story-teller, Or else the times have altered quite; For wits, or heavy, now, or light Hang each by a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... took down the David and set a fragment from the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had merely delayed his departure to New York, where ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... pitched. Providence took me by the hand, and—an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the newspapers announce, while I am writing from the Old Manse, into a custom-house.[76] As a story-teller I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... is their philosopher, and Howells is their novelist, but Dickens and Scott have large space on their shelves. All this does not prevent Mr. Herne from being an incorrigible joker, and a wonderfully funny story-teller. All dialects come instantly and surely to his tongue. The sources of his power as a dramatist are evident in his keen observation and retentive memory. Mrs. Herne's poet is Sidney Lanier, and she knows his principal ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... flies; so much so, indeed, that large numbers of the people suffer from diseased eyes, in consequence of these insects incessantly fastening on the sores caused by the irritating sand which fills the air. It was absurd for this Hebrew story-teller to scotch the last fly; he should have left sufficient to maintain ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... little kitten," said the story-teller, decidedly. "A little white kitten. She was standing right near a great big puddle of water. And what else do you ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... arrived with his goods, and Lincoln lived by odd jobs. At the very beginning one Mentor Graham, a schoolmaster officiating in some election, employed him as a clerk, and the clerk seized the occasion to make himself well known to New Salem as a story-teller. Then there was a heavy job at rail-splitting, and another job in navigating the Sangamon River. Offutt's store was at last set up, and for about a year the assistant in this important establishment had valuable opportunities of conversation with all New Salem. He had also leisure for study. He had ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the play of wildness and the development of extremes. I saw in a moment that, should this development proceed both with force and logic, my "story" would leave nothing to be desired. There is always, of course, for the story-teller, the irresistible determinant and the incalculable advantage of his interest in the story AS SUCH; it is ever, obviously, overwhelmingly, the prime and precious thing (as other than this I have never been able to see it); as to which what makes ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... one of the story-teller's rights,—and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... As each story-teller began his narrative, she cast a momentary glance in his direction, and then turned back to fire-gazing once more. Once or twice she cast a curious glance towards the far corner where Dan Vernon was seated, but he had drawn his chair so ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mature age, although he had not given up the thought of love affairs. He talked of his native mountains with enthusiasm. He would at any time sing the "Ranz des Vaches" with tears in his eyes, and was the best story-teller in the Comtesse Jules's circle. The last new song or 'bon mot' and the gossip of the day were the sole topics of conversation in the Queen's parties. Wit was banished from them. The Comtesse Diane, more inclined to literary pursuits than her sister-in-law, one day, recommended her ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... decent critic, your alcoholic friend," the Critic remarked. "He was full of good ideas, as you shall see," the story-teller replied. "I quite agree with you, if the bad whisky could have been kept away from him he might have shone in your profession. Anyhow, he had the makings of an honest man in him, and when the Vulcan enlarged its cliff-painting ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... magnetism for a motive force does not concern the literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what havoc the scientific method will work ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... word or name may have a signification in the language in which the story is told different from that which it possessed in the original dialect, and, in the effort to make the old fact and the new language harmonize, the story-teller is forced, gradually, to modify the narrative; and, as this lingual difficulty occurs at every fireside, at every telling, an ingenious explanation comes at last to be generally accepted, and the ancient myth remains dressed in a new ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... saucers of rice, beans and peas for offerings to the gods, the pigeons, and the two sacred horses, Albino ponies, with pink eyes and noses, revoltingly greedy creatures, eating all day long and still craving for more. There are booths for singing and dancing, and under one a professional story-teller was reciting to a densely packed crowd one of the old, popular stories of crime. There are booths where for a few rin you may have the pleasure of feeding some very ugly and greedy apes, or of watching mangy monkeys which ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... over-near familiarity. He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr. James does not see things with his eyes ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... which had not tempered down to the strength of my mature manhood. It was well for me that a sobering responsibility fell on me early, else I might have squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy story-teller whose sixty years sit lightly on him, there would have been only a ripple in the sod of the curly mesquite on the Plains and a little heap of dead dust, turned to the inert earth again. The West grows large ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... began to hint to the cardinal that she was fast getting into the Queen's good graces, by virtue of being a capital gossip and story-teller; and that she had frequent private audiences. Soon she added intimations that the Queen was far from being really so displeased with the cardinal, as he supposed. At this the old fool bit instantly, and showed the keenest emotions ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of a lyric, while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants. To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read Lavengro but not Romola. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the plot ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons |
