“I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.”

“Sometimes I think we need to tell our stories more than anyone needs to hear our stories. Maybe just so that anticipation or happiness can be reached for again. But other times it is almost as if the story itself wants repeating. So that the strand of hair caught in a kiss or the turn of a beautiful face isn't lost forever. So that, especially when it comes to beauty, we're not alone and left with the burden of remembering.”

“We all tell our stories the way we want to. And sometimes those stories have nothing to do with reality.”

“Some people think we’re made of flesh and blood and bones. Scientists say we’re made of atoms. But I think we are made of stories. When we die, that’s what people remember, the stories of our lives and the stories that we told.”

“I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.”

“The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.”