Narrative Identity Quotes

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

To be human is to be in a story.

We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad.

I tell a story, and therefore I exist.

I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? ...Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .

We are creatures of story.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.