Stories to Live By
We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But
Richard Powers • The Overstory: Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
“A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.”
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative
Joan Didion • The White Album: Essays
At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more
‘story’ in the sense I mean it: a foundational narrative that shapes every aspect of our world. Everything we build, literally and metaphorically, from the physical infrastructure of our society to our institutions and all the products of culture, have their roots in the story and reflect its logic back to us. The story surrounds us on a daily basi
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