Quotes About Narrative

the idea that we're "wired for story" is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.

Because we are compelled to make stories, we are often compelled to take incomplete stories and run with them.

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories.

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.

If we can learn how to feel our way through these experiences and own our stories of struggle, we can write our own brave endings. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

The most difficult part of our stories is often what we bring to them—what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others. Yes, maybe we lost our job or screwed up a project, but what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value.

But the idea that we're "wired for story" is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.

The story I'm making up: My emotions: My body: My thinking: My beliefs: My actions:

The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.

Rather than building trust by acknowledging, affirming, and believing, we shut people down when we experience discomfort or disinterest, or when we take over the narrative and make it about us or our perception of what happened.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul

we must also remember that our worthiness, that core belief that we are enough, comes only when we live inside our story.

When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.

When we reject the truth of someone's story—the ultimate failure of story stewardship—it's often because we've stealthily centered ourselves in their story, and the narrative takeover is about protecting our ego, behavior, or privilege

Like empathy, story stewardship is not walking in someone else's shoes, it's being curious and building narrative trust as they tell you about the experience of being in their own shoes. It's about believing people when they tell you what an experience meant to them.

If you own this story, you get to write the ending.

If you own this story you get to write the ending. If you own this story you get to write the ending.

I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.

We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings.

Tell the truth, but understand that it is not necessarily what happened," is one of the things she told him. "Every good story is a parable," is another.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

A full description of a person's life, however uneventful or uninteresting, fills a large folder.

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

Siempre me reafirmaba en la idea de que el ser humano es un ser narrante. Más Homo narrans que Homo sapiens.