“Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.”
“Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.”
“إنها مجنونة، متخبطة، وهي التي تكره المرأة المتخبطة، تكرر انه لم يعد يعني لها شيئا ثم تقودها أشواقها التي تنكرها إليه.”
“There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.”
“تتوقف دموعها وتستمر الأفكار كتيار قوي مندفع يسبب الألم لكل خلية من خلايا دماغها ويدمر فيها أي رغبة بالابتسام.”
“Neither Rose nor Charles liked to talk much of their adventures with the trolls, but some of the so-called softskins whom they had brought out of Niflheim, as well as the crew of the ship Soren had hired to go north to find Rose, must have spread the story, because for many years afterward, there were tales of a race of trolls living on top of the world. Only Rose and her white bear know the whole truth of it.”
“I don t really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn t really. It s just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“One incident in Ramayana, One day Mandodari (Ravan s wife) asked to Ravan, why you didn t touch Seeta? Ravan answered, When I was there to own her at the time of kidnaping I had become a stoic & in that sentiment I asked food by calling her as mother. After that word, I have never crossed the limitations of that word, only this is my Austerity”
“Ravan once said to Kumbhkarna, When I looked Seeta for first time, her holistic eyes killed by erotism & my wife seemed like mother to me.”
“As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.”
“A timeless classical love story our romance shall be… I ll paint it on vintage canvas cause your love transcends the realms defeats any measure of time and lasts forever. (fragment from Utopia , chapter Hope)”
“There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. ”
“Somehow life had become a story problem, and William was horrible at math.”
“We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can t stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself. We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy. The land holds stories.”
“It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more facts than they can process effectively. Giving them even more facts adds to the wrong pile. They don t need more facts. They need help finding their wisdom. Contrary to popular belief, bad decisions are rarely made because people don t have all the facts.”
“When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear s throat; separate a bowl s worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you ll know it has dimension. You ll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it.”
“And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.”