Quote of the Day (Ford Madox Ford, on an Author’s First Lesson)

“The first lesson that an author has to learn is that of humility…. Before everything the author must learn to suppress himself: he must learn that the first thing he has to consider is his story and the last thing that he has to consider is his story, and in between that he will consider his story."—English novelist and editor Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ann Patchett, on Religion and Storytelling)

“I suppose my ability to tell a story came from my good nature and a desire to keep everyone [in the family] together. Catholicism also was the perfect prep. Religion, in general, is story-based and teaches you to believe in what you can't see, and I did.”—American novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, quoted by Marc Myers, “House Call: Ann Patchett—A Late Reader, She Made Up Stories,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 25, 2023

Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on the Storyteller’s Gift)

“There is something mysterious about the endowment of the storyteller. Some very great writers possessed very little of it, and some others, lightly esteemed, possessed it in so large a measure that their books survive down the ages, to the confusion of severer critics. Alexandre Dumas had it to an extraordinary degree; while Melville, for all his splendid quality, had it barely sufficiently to raise his work from the realm of nonfiction. It springs, not, as some have said, from an aversion to general ideas, but from an instinctive coupling of idea and illustration; the idea, for a born storyteller, can only be expressed imbedded in its circumstantial illustration. The myth, the parable, the fable are the fountainhead of all fiction and in them is seen most clearly the didactic, moralizing, employment of a story. Modern taste shrinks from emphasizing the central idea that hides behind the fiction, but it exists there nevertheless, supplying the unity to fantasizing, and offering a justification to what otherwise we would repudiate as mere arbitrary contrivance, pretentious lying, or individualistic emotional association-spinning. For all their magnificent intellectual endowment, George Meredith and George Eliot were not born storytellers; they chose fiction as the vehicle for their reflections, and the passing of time is revealing their error in that choice. Jane Austen was pure storyteller and her works are outlasting those of apparently more formidable rivals.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” (1941), reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays, edited by Donald Gallup (1979)

Quote of the Day (Russell Banks, on Love and Storytelling)

“One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not.”—American fiction writer Russell Banks (1940-2023), Preface to The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2000)

Russell Banks died nearly a month ago, but it may be only now, within the last few days, that I feel truly reminded of the novelist and short-story writer.

The kind of weather we’re experiencing in the Northeast now is not only what he continually brought to withering life in novels like Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, but the kind he grew up with in New England—and it left its impact on his work through characters with withered, even stunted, life prospects, as he told Wesley Brown for a 1989 profile in The New York Times Magazine:

''Growing up in New Hampshire gave me an exaggerated sense of it as a place where the winters were endless, the soil barren and the houses falling down. I also had a pervasive anxiety about money. There was never enough to provide the basics of food, clothing and shelter. And if we got by at all, there was a sense of disaster being over the next horizon.''

It is hard to say at this point how posterity will judge his 21 books—much of it will depend on whether academics (as he was, at Princeton University, when not writing) will assign his works in their classes.

But anyone coming to the books of this nonpareil American realist will come away with a deepened sense of how his characters struggle with the multiple burdens of class, race, and family dysfunction, often ending up in the dead ends of drugs, alcoholism and violence.

Maybe because he identified with these marginalized characters and their backgrounds, he was able to look to look at them squarely and show readers that they really weren’t that different from them.

Though he wrote stories about individuals, this two-time Pulitzer finalist wrote with a particular vision of life in mind, which he shared in Continental Drift:

“We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.”

Quote of the Day (Irwin Shaw, on ‘The Reward of the Storyteller’)

“There is the reward of the storyteller, sitting cross-legged in the bazaar, filling the need of humanity in the humdrum course of the ordinary day for magic and distant wonders, for disguised moralizing that will set everyday transactions into larger perspectives, for the compression of great matters into digestible portions, for the shaping of mysteries into sharply edged and comprehensible symbols. Then there is the private and exquisite reward of escaping from the laws of consistency. Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and your tale is a joyful one.” —American fiction writer and playwright Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Sorrow and Storytelling)

“I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.” —Danish novelist Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), quoted by Bent Mohn in “Talk With Isak Dinesen,” The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 3, 1957

At least one of Dinesen’s works, Out of Africa, might be viewed in light of her explanation about making sense of sorrow. The memoir was born out of grief over her relationship with adulterous husband Baron Bror Blixen; the death of lover Denys Finch Hatton; and even the loss of the farm in Kenya she had come to cherish. (One of its most quoted lines, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” is deceptively simple; the verb, while indicating ownership, is in past tense, already signaling dispossession.)

(The image accompanying this post is from the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of Out of Africa, with Meryl Streep as Dinesen and Klaus Maria Brandauer as Baron Blixen. Robert Redford, unpictured, played Finch Hatton.)

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on Bewilderment and the Tales We Tell)

"It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored Olympians, mixed up with them." —American man of letters Henry James (1843-1916), Preface to The Princess Casamassima (1886)

Quote of the Day (Claire Messud, on Stories ‘To Calm the Chaos’)

“So many stories remain untold; so much that we have to learn, and to experience, is still hidden from the world. To attend to these stories is to slow our current hurtling, to calm the chaos, to return to what makes us human. It is to find the past and the present restored, as well as the possibility of the future. We can’t go on, we must go on: in this period of trial and transition, those of us for whom the power of the word is paramount must keep the flame alive. Nothing matters more.”—American novelist-essayist Claire Messud, from Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays (2020)

(Photo of Claire Messud taken at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival, Sept. 13, 2009, by Nightscream.)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on the Human ‘Wish to be Told a Story’)

“The simplest function of the novel is the tale, but only someone who has never tried it thinks that the discovery and relation of a tale is simple work. The wish to be told a story never dies in the human heart, and great storytellers enjoy a long life that more subtle writers sometimes envy.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), “Reading,” from The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1997)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on Storytellers and the ‘Redemptive Act’)

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”—Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1969)

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Loneliness and Storytelling)

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel—‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’” —American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968), “In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on How ‘There Are Only Two or Three Human Stories’)

“Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”— Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Sorrows and Stories)

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”—Danish author Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), quoted in Hannah Arendt., The Human Condition (1958)

Quote of the Day (Nora Ephron, on Turning ‘Everything Into a Story’)

“Vera said: ‘Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?’

“So I told her why.

“Because if I tell the story, I control the version.

“Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.

“Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much.

“Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”— Nora Ephron, Heartburn (1983)