“And humans will accept any story, however outlandish, when there s something in it for them. Preferably something green that folds.”
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don t rhyme and some stories don t have a clear beginning, middle and end.”
“This is my story and although I don’t know the ending yet, as I look back I can find empathy for myself and the beautiful mess I made along the way. As I look forward I get so excited to see what the next chapter holds.”
“The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once said that all of life can be summed up in these three words: not always so. We plan on our day going in a certain direction? Not always so. We expect a friend or relative to behave the way they always have? Not always so. There is the pattern, and then there is the dropped stitch that disrupts the pattern, making it all the more complex and interesting. Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks. Though there is a certain poetry in the rhythm of everyday, it is most often a shift, a moment of not-always-so, that ends up being the story. Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions when we’re at work.”
“Settle. The word gives me pause...I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There s a story I ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in life, and one I ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren t we all? We don t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we ve done the best we can. Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life. The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don t understand the difference.”
“History always Tells a Story!!! That s why you must Delete it Before your Kids are born!!”
“She sat next to me and told me that we were the people that the narrative would have followed out from the party if we were in a movie or a novel or something. We were where the story was, the story you could follow like a string, not all the overlapping party stories in the house, tangled up with too many dramas soaked in cheap alcohol and stuffed into not enough rooms.”
“The end of the climate emergency story is unknown. Each of us is a teller and a participant. The more perspectives and sensibilities we can bring to it, the richer the tale and its possible directions. We cannot choose the times we live in , but we can choose the stories we tell and live by,”
“This is not my story of finding God. This is my story about a God who did everything to find me”
“Are we a family damaged beyond repair? I don t know. I do believe in the power of words and stories to make sense of things.”
“The Purpose of the Universe is to Create Story.”
“When someone loses their way, it is almost always because they have lost their story. When they regain their story, they will regain their way.”
“For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs.”
“Our world is a dream of the gods. Maybe they have other dreams. But all we have is this story unfolding, and in the script of this world, nothing s going to bring Altan back to life.”
“There is always the rest of the story, right? Even if you don’t know right now what it is.”
“Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we ll ever really come to escape.”
“If you re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.”