Parker Palmer Quotes

When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.

A lot of storytelling... you're a bit hypnotized by it, and things just come out in certain ways, and you look at it and try to gather it.

I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.

I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.