“There’d be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we’d die unstoried deaths.”
“The seventh reader interrupts you: Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.”
“Mi ero svegliato stanco come mi ero addormentato, una luce tagliente che entrava dalla finestra creando dal nulla nuvole dorate di polvere. Non era la luce di tutti gli altri giorni, non era bianca o rosa, allegra o triste, rinfrescante, bagnata o calda, ma era più potente di tutte le luci di tutte le albe che avevo vissuto, riusciva a entrare fin negli angoli più nascosti, riusciva a curvare e percorrere i disegni dei più oscuri labirinti fino a svelare quegli interstizi dove mai luce era arrivata, dove forse mai lo sguardo si era posato. Guardando i suoi occhi neri e grandi non potevo fare a meno di pensare a quella luce verde che aveva inondato tutti gli oggetti, che era scesa dolorosamente negli occhi e che ora scorreva ineliminabile nelle vene. Di fronte al suo specchio di carne mi capitò di dire le cose verdi che non avrei mai pensato di poter dire e che forse non dovrebbero mai essere pronunciate”
“Story to me is life. It’s purpose. We as humans have an the opportunity and obligation to live the most truthful story ever told, unfortunately so few ever live truthfully. They don’t follow their dreams and live lives filled with regrets and “what ifs”. I make it my purpose to pursue the dreams and life that I want. It’s very hard, but at the end of the day, when people read the story of my life, they will say, “He was true to himself”.”
“Some people love their story that much even if it s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it s about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself”
“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
“You re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.”
“As children , wrote Alice Raikes (Mrs. Wilson Fox) in The Times, January 22, 1932, we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, So you are another Alice. I m very found of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling? We followed him into his house which opened, as ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner. Now , he said giving me an orange, first tell me which hand you have got that in. The right I said. Now , he said, go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in. After some perplexed contemplation, I said, The left hand. Exactly, he said, and how do you explain that? I couldn t explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn t the orange still be in my right hand? I can remember his laugh. Well done, little Alice, he said. The best answer I ve heard yet. I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.”
“And you’re disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story.”
“Everyone today has a story; the world’s an archive.”
“I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress. One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.”
“In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.”
“His story is simple, because simple is always best.”
“It s fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds”
“One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”
“Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you loved him until it was already too late. What was he to you? A friend? A lover? Or was he just some set piece in Rob Sardan’s great story? Is that what everyone is to you? Can’t we have our own story?”
“It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.”