Story Quotes
“There’s a poetic beauty in imagining that all the whispered conversations, cups of coffee, and daily minutiae add up to create a rich and textured story. Then there’s the reality of modern life: emails, chat notifications, system backups, and taxes. Our digital world has empowered us to accomplish so much, yet, many of us are proportionately beholden to electronic tools and tedious processes. My goal [is] to loosen their grip, to help you find more space and freedom.”
Aytekin Tank, Automate Your Busywork (Page 137)
“It’s a tricky balance, attempting to find resonance in someone’s story without reducing your suffering to sameness.”
Suleika Jaoaud, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 338)
“The power of story is to heal and to sustain. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we’re not alone, again and again.”
Katherine, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 307)
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
Hannah Arendt, via Sunbeams (Page 144)
“If you want to change your story, change your actions first. When we choose to act a certain way, our mind can’t help but rework our narrative to make those actions become coherent. We become what we do.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 19) | Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote ➜
“We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 123)
“Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this—stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us—we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 10)
“Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometimes assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.”
Hermann Hesse, Strange News From Another Star, via Sunbeams (Page 42)
“There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks down the hidden and destructive personal grammar that we have unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 69)