#stories

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#end #fiction #life #reading #stories

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#perspective #stories #love

True love stories never have endings. ↗

— Richard Bach

#love #love stories #never #stories #true

I have stories. But stories are not facts.' 'I like stories. Love them, actually. Most of the time they're better than facts. ↗

— Morgan Rhodes

#stories #love

Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside. ↗

— Tahir Shah

#storytelling #truth #dreams

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#dream #dreaming #inception #jorge-luis-borges #la-escritura-del-dios

It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it. ↗

— Tom Hiddleston

#human-nature #stories #tradition #life

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. ↗

— Anthony de Mello

#experience

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well. ↗

— Criss Jami

#artists #artists-life #creative #creativity #experiences

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. ↗

— Joan Didion

#stories #experience