Top 50 Oral Quotes

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There’s a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

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.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language – when you watch a film or listen to a tape – you don’t press pause.

I am trying to inspire people to just take control of their oral health, because if we don’t take care of our oral health, it affects so many different aspects of our lives. If your smile and mouth is not together, it affects your relationship, your self-esteem, your health.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person… to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.

There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

For the record, I believe that women and their doctors should have access to oral contraception when desired by the patient and medically appropriate.

I am on the power toothbrush train and I’m asking people to try to using an Oral B power toothbrush. I just started using one and I cannot believe that I waited this long to use a power toothbrush. It’s so much easier than using a manual toothbrush.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

What I love about jazz is that it’s full of legends, full of myths. It’s an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.

First and foremost, I’m an oral storyteller – I’ll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.

My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

I’ve been working to see that mental health is raised in both oral and written question sessions in parliament.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences – what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.

I wouldn’t even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.

I read Pamela Colloff’s oral history about the campus shooting, ’96 Minutes,’ when it was first published, and my wheels immediately starting turning toward making a film and making it an animated re-telling.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It’s not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

People are always saying it’s the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it’s a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it’s a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven‘t the least idea of where poetry is going.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

In Germany, apprentices undergo a final examination in the vocational school and an oral examination and practical test in the workplace. The same should happen in Britain.

I’ve always been interested in oral traditions and mythological stories and legends from antiquity that have to do with nature, attempts to explain mysterious or puzzling, or very striking phenomena from nature. Things that people observed or heard about in nature.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

The Veteran’s History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America’s war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories.

I don’t need politicians doing a 24-hour prayer with Oral Roberts to get our country back on track.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.

I don’t travel and tell stories, because that’s not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.

Abraham was extremely wealthy and he had a covenant with God. It’s not the Jewish blessing, it’s the Abrahamic blessing. I get excited talking about it ’cause I love it and I started out deep in debt with nothing. I had to learn this from the Bible and from my spiritual mentor Oral Roberts.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

The four principal oral instructors to whom I feel my mind indebted for improvement were Joseph Fawcet, Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I must confess that although I am quite passionate about the books I create for children, I am not the best oral storyteller. In fact, I stink at it.

In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I’ve been thinking about how subjective history is.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.