“What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look.”

“We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes, and a story we tell about ourselves.' And what others say about us.”

“I’m a culture hero,” he said. “We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay.”

“We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.”

“Most of us have had the experience of creating beauty, whether by cleaning a room, planting a bed of flowers or hanging a painting. Our first impulse is to say, “Come and see! Look what I did!” Though it may be a long time since mom or dad came to see, we still have the need to share—to be seen, acknowledged, appreciated. But it’s more than approval we seek; we want to extend the joy. We want someone to help us make it more real, to linger with us in the warmth.”

“I think most of us tell ourselves we don't want what we think we can't have just to make life bearable.”