“We can only re-tell stories; we attempt, in doing so, to tell new stories. Is there a way out of this bind? I think the trick is to enter into it completely. Avoid purity. The idea of perfection sounds awfully boring.”

“We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.”

“And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.”

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

“From the recovery experience of hundreds of thousands of people, we know that there is an effective way out of this constricting and binding effect of shame: to tell the story of our suffering to safe and supportive others. (51)”

“A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”