Quote – We Are All Just Stories and We Need To Be Proud and Remember Our Stories

“That’s all we are. Just stories. You and me, everybody, we’re a set of stories, and what these stories are is what makes us what we are…. Same thing for a tribe and a city and a nation and a world. It’s all these stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are. We got to stop forgetting and get back to remembering. We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself. You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don’t want to know the stories, because we don’t want to remember. But we’ve got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they’ll never lose the war, because for them to lose the war you’ve got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on.”

-Charles de Lint – “Coyote Stories” In The Very Best of Charles de Lint.