We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
Interpretation
Stories help us make sense of our troubles and beliefs.
William Kittredge's quote emphasizes the significance of storytelling in processing our life's challenges and experiences. By sharing and listening to stories, we find coherence in our struggles, recognize our values, and confront the darker aspects of our lives, suggesting that narratives are essential to not only understand ourselves but also to maintain our sanity amidst chaos.
In practice
In a therapy session, a counselor could use this quote to emphasize the importance of narrative in healing.
It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.
Quickness is the essence of the war.
No man or woman is an island. To exist just for yourself is meaningless. You can achieve the most satisfaction when you feel related to some greater purpose in life, something greater than yourself.
Your "if" is the only peacemaker; much virtue in "if.
It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.
But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
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