Quotes About Story

What do we call a story that's based on limited real data and imagined data and blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality? A conspiracy theory.

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. The less diverse our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find ourselves struggling with narrative takeover or narrative tap-out.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That's why it loves perfectionists—it's so easy to keep us quiet. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we've basically cut it off at the knees. Shame hates having words wrapped around it. If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

to the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens,' the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are 'always consoling in their simplicity" bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story

The rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings--what emotions we're experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.

Our faith narratives must be protected, and we must remember that no person is ordained to judge our divinity or to write the story of our spiritual worthiness.

The four elements of shame resilience: Name it. Talk about it. Own your story. Tell the story.

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—

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

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

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That's why it loves perfectionists- it's so easy to keep us quiet. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we've basically cut it off at the knees. Shame hates having words wrapped around it. If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way the light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

Story stewardship means honoring the sacred nature of story—the ones we share and the ones we hear—and knowing that we've been entrusted with something valuable or that we have something valuable that we should treat with respect and care.

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

Curiosity is a shit-starter. But that's okay. Sometimes we have to rumble with a story to find the truth.

If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we've basically cut it off at the knees. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the Gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

The dress only means something if you want it to. What is important are the people behind it. When it comes to these things that are handed down from generation to generation, each woman leaves her own mark on it, so that it tells ours story, stitch by stitch.

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.

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

In most testimonies the good news is only a small part of the story, obscured by our achieving and overcoming. In Brennan's story, and in mine, the good news is the entire story, which blessedly leaves us with nothing to prove or protect.

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.

The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated.

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

Kertomus on matka, joka ei lopu koskaan.