individual narratives Quotes

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Everyone wins the marathon. We all have the same feeling at the start-nervous, anxious, excited. It is a broader, richer, and even with twenty-seven thousand people-more intimate experience than I found when racing in track. New York is the marathon that all the biggest stars want to win, but has also been the stage for an array of human stories more vast than any other sporting event.

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

I believe that when we love someone, we respect them, and we listen to them; we feel that their voice matters. And- we let them dictate the terms of who they are and what their story is.

Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets. In every face.

I'm a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell.

There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

We are all historians in our small way.

I'm still very interested in telling one-of-a-kind women's stories.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

Everyone's story matters.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.