"The success of Homo sapiens as a species is built on our inability to tell the difference between a fiction and a reality."

~ Yuval Noah Harari

"It’s easier to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself."

~ Nate Staniforth

"My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private."

~ Billy Collins

Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.

~ Albert Huffstickler

Readers like stories when they feel engaged by them. Whether the story is pleasant, neutral or unpleasant matter doesn’t really matter. Readers simply enjoy the feeling of being engaged by a story.

People like to look at their own lives as a story.

~ Matthew Gentzkow

"Fiction, like poetry, works at its best when it brings together emotion as well as idea, passion as well as characters in the illusory unfolding we call time—when it works close to the timing of the human pulse, to the flow of our blood, to the beat of our heart."

~ Alan Cheuse

"When you read it you realize that everything is constantly changing, and that that is, at least often, the key to a great story..."

~ Ben Marcus

"The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time."

~ Antonio Damasio

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

"The dominant story of modernity has been progress. Although still hardwired into our institutions, that story has lost most of its plausibility. new genres are taking its place: apocalypse and nihilism. Apocalypse is the imminent and triumphant conclusion of our most cherished stories. Nihilism is their collapse. Both are stories about the end of stories."

~ David R. Loy

nodus tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore

"Structure, it's all imposed. We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos."

~ Julianne Moore

"The moment of awakening reveals two kinds of self-experience." ~ Evan Thompson

"What I find very strange is this. That I think what's magnificent about Bach is that when you listen to this music, and it moves you so much, I mean, it's just a bunch of sound waves crashing into your ear, and you have to contain — you see this emotion bubbling up, you start seeing, like, tearing up, and saying, well, what's going on? These are just sounds crashing into my — what's going on in here?"

~ Bernard Chazelle 

"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity." ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided.” ~ Adam Phillips