#stories

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

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#poe #short-stories #the-cask-of-amontillado #equality

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

[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness. ↗

— William Deresiewicz

#stories #experience

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK. ↗

— Stephen King

#creating #desert #faith #house #idea

Just think of what would have happened to poor old Naaman if he had decided to dunk himself only once? ↗

— Lawana Blackwell

#faith #humor-inspirational #seven #faith

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#stories #family

You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,' he says, 'the same way this theater seems to digest people.' With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs. Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud. But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#food

He has left nothing except for a note, which I find neatly folded under one of my sneakers. The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain. And then, in smaller letters: Forgive me. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#lena-holloway #stories-of-the-book-of-shhh #forgiveness