Quotes About Self-narrative

It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.

Remember, you can't change anybody else. But you can write your own story differently.

When it comes to the bad stuff, the inside view tends to lead you to blame luck rather than your own decision-making. After all, luck is the easiest escape hatch for keeping your self-narrative intact. But identifying luck as the primary culprit for your situation won't help you much in addressing the situation.

El arte primordial es el narrativo, porque, para poder ser, los humanos nos tenemos previamente que contar. La identidad no es más que el relato que nos hacemos de nosotros mismos.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America's story arc.

And I flat out refuse to have one of those lives that I wouldn't even want to read about.

We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")

It's not our parents' fault. Or our schools'. Or the government's. Or our friends'. They all have their own issues—no need to blame them. But there's no need to say yes to their stories either. Now is the time for us to build our own stories.

You are the author of your own life, and it's never too late to replace the stories you tell yourself and the world. It's never too late to begin a new chapter, add a surprise twist, or change genres entirely.

We learned that we are the stories we tell ourselves, and so we have to tell those stories with great care. Because whatever stories we tell ourselves, are true.

And so we create a story—a "drama about me"—that may gradually wander far away from the here and now and far away from the way things actually are. Once the script we have concocted for ourselves has been set in the mind, we may unwittingly rely on it as a reference point for all present and future judgments—without ever checking back with the here and now. Without knowing it, our thoughts become words carved in stone rather than words written on water.

When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen!

we become the stories we tell ourselves