Sublime

As usual, we don't really have a problem with the fictional; we have a problem with the real. Reality is unsatisfying and scary; fiction about reality fixes those problems. It's much easier for us to navigate reality if we can reduce it to simple, digestible patterns: if our public institutions and our fellow human beings can be flattened into imme

If Ricoeur is right about the need for narrative to represent time, White insists that Ricoeur’s emphasis on narrative as “found” and not “constructed” avoids the necessarily political nature of narrative construction. “What is imaginary about narrative representation is the idea of a centered consciousness looking out on to the world and represent

There is an undeniable pattern in the sum total of all these old stories from around the world, indicating that sedentary lifestyles and cultures that do not move with the land or mimic land-based networks in their social systems do not transition well through apocalyptic moments.

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retai

Whereas the original folk tale was cultivated by a narrator and the audience to clarify and interpret phenomena in a way that would strengthen meaningful social bonds, the narrative perspective of a mass-mediated fairy tale has endeavored to endow reality with a total meaning except that the totality

the stories that are governing their lives may be a major contributor—and in some cases the major contributor—to their material condition.

The Radically Curious leader is intrinsically multilingual, looking beyond the literal language of traditional books to read culture as a set of stories. Developing this cultural literacy requires that we (1) be honest about naming legacy narratives, (2) listen deeply in order to identify upending indicators, and (3) begin to imagine and articulate

Often, we have to rid ourselves of older dominant narratives before we can be open to new ones—pushing to one side stories about the virtues of our nation, political system or economy that have become so embedded in our minds through constant repetition that we never question them

In narrative coaching, we look beyond the traditional bias for specialized professional knowledge to make room for other forms of knowledge