Karen Armstrong Quotes

If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it's an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn't real, if it's just an allegory, it's just a story, then what's the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from?

Research is always the best part. As we dug deeper into the history and mythology behind each of the hallows, we discovered more and more stories - some of them deserving of novels in themselves.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Every episode has a purpose to move the story forward.

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

Stories have inspired me all my life. I like reading about what other people have done and it inspires me to share my own stories, and encourage people to make their own life stories.

The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?

Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity.

Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Even just reading "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore,"I got a sense of the world and the story [Macon Blair] wanted to tell. And then I had a meeting with him and understood how he likes to work. I really trusted him from the beginning.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.

Whenever someone says they believe the earth was created in 7 days, I grab a fossil and say, Fossil. And if they keep talking, I throw it just over their heads.

But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?

I've always been into having stories told to me. I was a voracious reader, my father was also a teller of tales; and the kind of Baron Munchausen proxy of a tall tale was much more interesting than a true tale.

I just did a dramatic love story. Whether it's a cultural phenomenon is not for me to say.

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

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.