The Story Of Our Lives Quotes

I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves. ~ Sam Keen

We have more control than most of us realize. Each day is filled with thousands of opportunities to change the story of our lives. ~ Michael Hyatt

We don't have to believe the story of our lives we've been told. You're not the same person you were when you first had sex and not the same as you'll be five years down the line. All redefining yourself requires is the bravery to be fearless, and let go of the judgments. ~ Laura Berman

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. ~ Linda Grant

But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one. ~ Katherine Center

I like the idea all memory is fiction, that we have queued a couple of things in the back of our minds and when we call forth those memories, we are essentially filling in the blanks. We're basically telling ourselves a story, but that story changes based on how old we are, and what mood we're in, and if we've seen photographs recently. We trust other people to tell us the story of our lives before we can remember it, and usually that's our parents and usually it works, but obviously not always. And everybody's interpretation is going to be different. ~ Steven Tyler

It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something - anything - else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there's no subtracting it. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

There is no rest for the striver. Just beyond the completion of each goal on our life-achievement "bucket list" looms another goal, and then another. Meanwhile, of course, the clock is ticking - quite loudly, in fact. We become breathless. And we have no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of our twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends or listening to music or musing about the story of our lives. And we will never get another chance for that. ~ Daniel Klein

There's a romance to danger. There's a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the STORY of our lives better. ~ Joey Comeau

The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. ~ Katherine Center

What if God, in giving us life, invites us to collaborate in writing the story of our lives? ~ Adam Hamilton

Once the next life - the better life, the fuller life - has to be in this one, we have a considerable task on our hands. Now someone is asking us not only to survive but to flourish, not simply or solely to be good but to make the most of our lives. It is a quite different kind of demand. The story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living. (…)
Because we are nothing special - on a par with ants and daffodils - it is the work of culture to make us feel special. (…) This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what can of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life - the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life - the unloved life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives: and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek. ~ Adam Phillips

Ken has three kids. I have three kids. The first movie was basically the story of our lives. Every man is kind of a villain until he then has kids. And then, they soften us up. ~ Cinco Paul

We are always young to know the story of our lives. ~ Himanshu Chhabra

Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors. ~ Rick Steves

What matters isn't our stated belief and doctrine but how we live and what we experience in the story of our lives, as Jesus, John, James, and Paul all make so abundantly clear. It's our actual experience and expression of life that shows us and the world what we truly believe and to what extent we truly love, not what we say we believe or who we say we love. If we say we have faith, but the workings of our life don't reflect that faith, that faith is either asleep or dead. ~ Ted Dekker

We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it. ~ Mark Strand

Gossip is the story of our lives," she said.``It is the way a society works out how it is to behave. Our manners, our morals,our mores ~ Marion Halligan

Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance
the nerves that run out into the world
expand the self beyond its physical bounds. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep. ~ Mark Strand

If you were you ask ten couples how they got engaged, each of them would have a different story. If you asked ten Christians how they came to know Christ, they would have different stories as well. God treats us as individuals. He knows what makes our hearts sing. He knows our love language. Jesus orchestrates His "proposal" moment with us and knows what it takes to woo us. He desires for us to rise up and leave all other pursuers. He wants us to be His alone, knowing that one day He will return when all is ready for the wedding. He will call to us to come away and be with Him forever. Until that day, we can live with unwavering confidence, knowing that we are promise to Him. We are spoken for. ~ Robin Jones Gunn

But in the end, science does not provide the answers most of us require. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, "How did it all begin?", science answers, "Probably by an accident." To the question, "How will it all end?", science answers, "Probably by an accident." And to many people, the accidental life is not worth living. Moreover, the science-god has no answer to the question, "Why are we here?" and, to the question, "What moral instructions do you give us?", the science-god maintains silence. ~ Neil Postman

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith - not a Christianity bound by a sinner's prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that's always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing. ~ Kaitlin B. Curtice

Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet? ~ Elif Batuman

Making room for gleaning limits and disciplines our daily exercise of power. Any of us who possesses any significant power should ask each day what we might leave undone that day for the sake of others' creativity. But on a weekly basis we are commanded not just to leave margins around our exercise of power but to withdraw from it altogether. In the practice of sabbath, as of making room for gleaning, we once again play in the footsteps of the Creator God, whose work was not without rest and within whose sabbath all the rest of the story has unfolded. ~ Andy Crouch

While a good story must give me a role, and must extend beyond my horizons, it need not be true. A story can be pure fiction, and yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. Indeed, to the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don't really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe just does not work like a story.
So why do people believe in these fictions? One reason is that their personal identity is built on the story. People are taught to believe in the story from early childhood. They hear it from their parents, their teachers, their neighbours and the general culture long before they develop the intellectual and emotional independence necessary to question and verify such stories. By the time their intellect matures, they are so heavily invested in the story, that they are far more likely to use their intellect to rationalise the story than to doubt it. Most people who go on identity quests are like children going treasure hunting. They find only what their parents have hidden for them in advance.
Second, not only our personal identities but also our collective institutions are built on the story. Consequently, it is extremely frighte ~ Yuval Noah Harari

It seems a simple task. We all know what water looks like, feels like in our mouth. Water is ubiquitous. Describing a cup of water feels a little like doing a still life painting. As a child I used to wonder: Why do people spend so much time painting bowls of fruit, when they could be painting dragons? Why learn to describe a cup of water, when the story is about cool magic and (well) dragons?

It's a thing I had trouble with as a teenage writer - I'd try to rush through the "boring" parts to get to the interesting parts, instead of learning how to make the boring parts into the interesting parts. And a cup of water is vital to this. Robert Jordan showed me that a cup of water can be a cultural dividing line–the difference between someone who grew up between two rivers, and someone who'd never seen a river before a few weeks ago.

A cup of water can be an offhand show of wealth, in the shape of an ornamented cup. It can be a mark of traveling hard, with nothing better to drink. It can be a symbol of better times, when you had something clean and pure. A cup of water isn't just a cup of water, it's a means of expressing character. Because stories aren't about cups of water, or even magic and dragons. They're about the people painted, illuminated, and changed by magic and dragons. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I needed a piece of a story, something real and full of life and blood and breath and heartache, something that someone had lived through, a piece of wisdom earned the hard way. That's why telling our stories is so important. ~ Shauna Niequist

Kentucky has always said you can't really make bourbon outside of Kentucky because it's a combination of the barrels and the limestone-fed springs that give us the water. That's our story, and we're sticking to it. ~ John Yarmuth

This is the secret I kept from you, Bails, from myself too: I think I liked that Mom was gone, that she could be anybody, anywhere, doing anything. I liked that she was our invention, a woman living on the last page of the story with only what we imagined spread out before her. I liked that she was ours, alone. ~ Jandy Nelson

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.

("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before. ~ Maureen Johnson

People know us best for our entrepreneurial success as the founders of Three Dog Bakery; what they don't know is that we owe it all to a gigantic deaf dog named Gracie. But even though Gracie sowed the seeds of our success, this isn't a book about "making it." This is the story of a dog who was born with the cards stacked against her, but whose passionate, joyful nature helped her turn what could have been a dog's life into a victory of the canine spirit - and, in the process, save two guys who thought they were saving her. ~ Dan Dye

The Meaning of Birds

Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves
until something in the snatch of color
began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter
anyway how they got up high
in the trees or over the rusty shoulders
of some mountain? There they are,
little figments,
animated---soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in ~ Charlie Smith

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared ~ Steven Pinker

Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. ~ Isak Dinesen

Maybe the story of our life is what we make of it. I mean, we're dealt the rain and the sun, but maybe it's up to us to push away the clouds in order to see the rainbow. ~ Laura Miller

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something
make something
with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing. ~ Patricia Hampl

Jesus was definitely not inviting these fishermen into a church job or an engaging hobby, which is how many of us understand vocation in the Church today. If we are not careful, our ingrained expectation of a professional class of clergy will quickly sabotage our ability to understand the ministry of Jesus and the disciples. Our bias builds churchy furniture into this story where there is none. We put our church goggles on and read the idea that the disciples called on that seashore were the first priests of the church back into the scripture. They used to make money as fishermen, then they made their money as ministers. (Luke 10:4-11) This was not the case. ~ C. Andrew Doyle

In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today. ~ Howard Zinn

I want you to read 'God Sees the Truth, but Waits,' " said Mother. "Tolstoy writes about a man, wrongly accused of a murder, who spends the rest of his life in a prison camp. Twenty-six years later, as a convict in Siberia, he meets the true murderer and has an opportunity to free himself, but chooses not to. His longing for home leaves him and he dies." I ask Mother why this story matters to her. "Each of us must face our own Siberia," she says. "We must come to peace within our own isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia." Suddenly, two white birds about the size of finches, dart in front of us and land on the snow. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I rest my forehead against hers, and we sit in a comfortable silence, translating our love through touch. The Princess and the Warrior, I decide in my head. When they tell the story of tomorrow, that is what they shall call it. ~ Tomi Adeyemi

Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice. We are all telling ourselves a story. ~ Will Smith

It's easy to allow the world to collapse down to our own stories. To see ourselves as the central figure in the only story worth knowing and forget that every person we encounter is living their own, is the center of their own universe. But that's the nature of the human experience. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

This is life. Our bodies change. Our minds change. Our hearts change. Things are always evolving. I hope we can be supportive of each other and try to really have each other's backs, especially when we don't know the whole story. ~ Emma Stone

Though pundits and politicians, weary of the story, are happy to omit facts about voting systems and their private contractors running our public elections, such omissions impair voters and democracy itself. ~ Mimi Kennedy

It is our experiences in their entirety that proves to be the mold required to shape us into the person we need to be;for what is the point of life without an exceptional story of overcomed adversities? ~ Renee' A. Lee

I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants. ~ Bruce Feiler

We come to the page with too many expectations. Each poor little story is like a trembling donkey upon which we heap tons of weight. We don't just want a good book, we want a bestseller. If it isn't perfect, we hate it. If it isn't 100% right, it's 1000% wrong. Problem: we care too damn much. It's all or nothing with us and that's the kind of dichotomy that shanks our happiness right in the kidneys. So: care less. Ease off the stress stick. Have more fun with what you're doing. When your kids and dogs play in the mud, you can either freak out that they're too dirty, or you can laugh and jump in the mud, too. So, fuck it: jump in the damn mud already. ~ Chuck Wendig

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state. ~ Rick Perlstein

In The Story you will see that the two mice do better when they are faced with change because they keep things simple, while the two Littlepeople's complex brains and human emotions complicate things. It is not that mice are smarter. We all know people are more intelligent than mice. However, as you watch what the four characters do, and realize both the mice and the Littlepeople represent parts of ourselves-the simple and the complex - you can see it would be to our advantage to do the simple things that work when things change. In ~ Spencer Johnson

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it's the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story. ~ Rosemary Clement-Moore