"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.

When I talk to people about finding stories in their life, I'm talking about finding things that are almost in their everyday that they can bring great meaning to and connect to audiences or to people around the lunch table.

~ Matthew Dicks

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

~ Matthew Gentzkow

"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

nodus tollens

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

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

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see."

~ Elif Shafak

"The reason that we have the impression that the world is a violent place is that that's what news is about. News is about stuff that happens, not about stuff that doesn't happen, and all the parts of the world that are free of war, that are free of terrorist attacks just don't get reported to us and so we forget about them. We're getting better and better at reporting the violent events that do occur. Something blows up, you can be sure you'll hear about it, but we don't appreciate how much of the world at any given time is at peace."

~ Steven Pinker

"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

"One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us."

~ Russell Banks, from The Angel on the Roof

"You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise."

~ Wendell Berry