A Story Can't Be Verbatim

Image by kilo75 via Flickr

"A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words—a two hour metaphor that says: Life is like this Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived.  A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 25

Don't Stand By

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."

- Albert Einstein

Happy Monday Everyone! Here's an inspirational quote that will hopefully motivate us to stand up and take action when we see injustice.

I think this would be a great quote to use in the classroom. It relates to bullying and would work well with the prevention programs we see in schools nowadays.

p.s. Found this image on Facebook. Feel free to head on over there and friend me. I haven't used it much in the past but am starting to get more active on that site now. 

You Can’t Donate People Out of Poverty

“You can’t donate people out of poverty.”
- Paul Polak on The Hour 10 June 2008

This quote reminds me of the old cliché,

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever.”

It's Always About The Adventure

Image via WikipediaLaura: "Greg, I am so sorry. I really meant to marry you. I did. And suddenly, I put on that wedding dress and I thought, 'Here I go, my last great adventure.' And then I realized, I was only 22 and I've hardly had any great adventures."

Greg: "You don't think starting a family is an adventure?"

Laura: "Why, sure it is. It's just not-"

Greg: "Paris."

Laura: "You still finish my sentences."

Greg: "And you are still the prettiest girl I have ever laid eyes on."

Laura: "You need to let me go."

Greg: "When I was 15, I read a story in Boy's Life about climbing Kilimanjaro. And it seemed about as far away as the moon. But I mowed lawns all summer so that I could make the trek. Saved almost three hundred dollars. It wasn't enough by a long shot but I put it in the bank and I swore that someday that money would go towards an adventure."

Laura: "And what did you spend it on?"

Greg: "A ring. But that's not the point.If what you are leaving me for is-"

Laura: "Kilimanjaro"

Greg: "Then Bon Voyage, Laura. Safe journey."

- Pan Am television series: Season 1: Episode 2 "We'll Always Have Paris"

How to Disarm all Hostility

Image via WikipediaHenry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

When we’re hurting or angry or betrayed, and we can still find the inner strength to tap into that compassion within our soul to disarm our hostility towards others, then we have made the dream of transcendental love a reality.

- Judy Croome - from an interview on Positive Letters.... inspirational stories