A quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

“The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism.”

Haruki Murakami

All of this research shows that we are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. The Picture of Dorian Gray.