Oral Tradition Quotes - Page 2

• John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Mother, Thinking, Whales

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.175, Vintage

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• People get strange about whether you've written your own songs, which seems really stupid considering that, especially in Country Music, it's about oral tradition and passing things on and the songs weren't meant to be played by one person and then forgotten.

  Neko Case

  Country, Song, Stupid

  "Neko Case: Thrice All American". Interview with Michaelangelo Matos, www.furious.com.

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• I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Character, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• We have oral traditions in Mali, and songs are passed down and around this way. I think in the US you can play all the time in your own room and never see another musician your whole life. We can't understand that in Mali.

  Vieux Farka Toure

  Song, Thinking, Play

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• There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Stories, Don't Change, Myth

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• Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it).

  George Gershwin

  Song, New York, Essence

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• People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

  Campbell McGrath

  School, Years, People

  "Campbell McGrath on Poetry, Walt Whitman and Schaefer Beer" by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. March 01, 2008.

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• It is suggested that all written works, including this one, have dangerous implications to the vitality of an oral tradition and to the health of a civilization, particularly if they thwart the interest of a people in culture, and following Aristotle, the cathartic effects of culture. "It is written but I say unto you" is a powerful directive to Western civilization.

  Harold Innis

  Powerful, Civilization, People

  "Empire and Communications". Book by Harold Innis, pp. 19-20, 2007.

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• For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

  Chinua Achebe

  Reading, Writing, People

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

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