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.
And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.
People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media.
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.
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