The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be “like real life” in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.
The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was ‘the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.’
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.
In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.
We have all heard the story of the man who preached so well and lived so badly, that when he was in the pulpit everybody said he ought never to come out again, and when he was out of it they all declared he never ought to enter it again.
You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Men’s stories are seen as universal, women’s as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.
My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community – with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people – so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.
A good story should change the way you see the world.
That’s how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.
After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear.
I really believe it’s the moments we can’t talk about that become the rest of our lives. It’s the moments we can’t process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.