Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

‘The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to

Storytelling has that same fundamentally religious function – it fuses the disparate, gives us shape, and in doing so instils in us quiet.

But that’s only the first shock. The second is that we enjoy the view.

stories have the power to make us connect; stories make us human.

Storytelling, then, is born from our need to order everything outside ourselves.

history is littered with the corpses of those who from known facts have deduced wrongful – and occasionally disastrous – conclusions.

It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

two opposites are assimilated and a conflict is stilled.

We live what our protagonists live.