The Story Keeper Quotes

“Our stories are powerful. They teach, they speak, they inspire. They bring about change. But they are also fragile. Their threads are so easily broken by time, by lack of interest, by failure to understand the value that comes of knowing where we have been and who we have been. In this speed-of-light culture, our histories are fading more quickly than ever. Yet when we lose our stories, we lose ourselves. . . .”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Even when we are lost, God has not lost us.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“A man who doesn’t stand for what is right dies his own death well before it happens.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Hardship finds its way into every life. It’s just much easier to see our own than other people’s. Hannah”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Sometimes a world that doesn’t exist is the only escape from the one that does.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“no matter how many wrong choices we’ve made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future. The”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“no matter how many wrong choices we’ve made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“When we lose our stories, we lose ourselves.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“We can never really know, except in hindsight, how prayers will be answered.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“All things pass, suga’ pea. All the things a this worl’ got a time for bornin’ and time for dyin’, and a time for troublin’ and a time for restin’. Ssshhh”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“the reality is that containers often tell nothing of the contents.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“gave in and let the tears happen. A good rain smooths out the soil, Wilda Culp used to say. I needed a good rain.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Where there is injustice, one must stand against it. Where there is suffering, one must be the hands and feet of our Lord. Where there is opportunity for good, one must seize it. As go our words, so must our acts.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Sarra considered this. “Our folk come a many places, Aginisi told it. She give me the tale a the sea folk, but the tale a the mountain folk too. Both of them’s in her blood, so she give me stories from one and stories from t’other. Said it was fer me to keep them stories safe. ‘Sarra,’ she says many a time, ‘all things a flesh and blood pass, but stories is the one part goes on here’n this world. You ken the stories, and when I’m shed a this place, then it’ll be you who’s the story keeper.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Aginisi give me tales a the sea folk. Her mama’s people come a that place.” She slipped the bone necklace from beneath her blouse, held it reverently, allowing him to see. “This come a them, long time back. Come over the water as they come.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“There remained no place in Charleston for a girl of mixed blood like Sarra, nor would such a place exist within his lifetime. Never would tolerance of her be had in polite society. Not abovestairs, and even the women in his mother’s kitchen would not permit her company. Some wealthy man would undoubtedly soon take her to mistress, lured by her exotic beauty, yet ashamed of what she was.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“I was struck again by the fact that, for all appearances, this was a beautiful life. A perfect life. It’s so easy to make assumptions, passing by other people’s homes at a distance.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“All you need do is ask, Jennia Beth Gibbs. No sense making a thief of yourself, now is there? You keep it . . . and remember that no matter how many wrong choices we’ve made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Conscience is a formidable and determined adversary. By nature, it strikes the weakest point in a man’s reasoning. His”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Chances are, each one of us can relate to that story in some way. We all care about the human element, the part that’s timeless. But we also care about those turning points in history, those social mores that we can’t believe were accepted just a generation ago. We want to believe we would never have stood for it ourselves, had we been there.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“A Melungeon. She ain’t white, she ain’t colored, she ain’t Injun. Ain’t any one a them three kinds would claim her. Ain’t just any fool’d take a chance on her, neither. Them Melungeons been hidin’ up in these mountains long’s anyone can remember. Got a certain look to ’em, like her—dark skin, but not red like a Injun. Black hair, and them cold blue eyes.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“When the negative comes against her, she must B-E-A-T. Be, expand, arise, triumph. Be all that she was designed to be. Expand her vision of what is possible. Arise from every challenge stronger than before. Triumph over her own insecurity. This is what I always told my students.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Sometimes a world that doesn't exist is the only escape from one that does.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“chance on foreign territory.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“No stretch of the imagination, no far-flung splinter of hope is too remote for God. If I’ve learned one thing, that is it. In the end, this is what I have decided about my family, about the place I’ve come from, with all its beauty and tragedy. Yes, I can put my hands and my feet and my heart to work trying to remedy the things that are within my power, but so much of it isn’t. What can’t be understood and neatly sewn up must simply be let go, not in the way of giving up, but in the way of understanding who is really in control”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“What can’t be understood and neatly sewn up must simply be let go, not in the way of giving up, but in the way of understanding who is really in control of it.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“She’d noticed immediately that I understood the lure of a good story. Sometimes a world that doesn’t exist is the only escape from the one that does.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“the”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“Hardship finds its way into every life. It’s just much easier to see our own than other people’s.”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper

“feel that God was so very close, so very concerned with my particular life, so very ready to protect and to love. Always nearby. Always listening. Always leading. But”
― Lisa Wingate, The Story Keeper