Each of Us is Story

“Each of us is a story. We pile up experience, events, conversations, sights and sounds, but we do it hourly, daily weekly, month in, month out, in a kind of jumble. Most of us are not writers, novelists, story-makers, and we are not very good, certainly not well trained, at organizing our material into an understandable narrative. So our daily lives are like a collection of random notes, jumbles together in a shoebox, not placed in a sequence that makes any kind of sense. Things happen to us, not us to them. We do not impose order on experience. Novelists are people who do that. They take experience and they weave it into a tapestry where others, readers, can see the pattern and take pleasure in the harmony and order of the whole. By reading story we can fell the peace of sense, and by sharing this we get the feeling of sense, the model that making sense is possible.”
- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 330-331

Joseph Gold uses literature in his practice to help his patience. This links up with the Stephen King quote I posted last week. Art can be a life support system. Gold’s book shows us that we can use story to organize our life and make sense of the things. He basically tells us that story is the organizing aspect of our memories and our lives.
It is an amazing read.

I believe that Story is the nature of reality. I have collected hundreds of quotations on the topic and want to write a scholarly book on this topic. I thought that by sharing my quotes here, I might be able to get this project off the ground. I have wanted to do this for years now.

I will be sharing story quotes here every week and will be running a series on my main blog as well. I hope you enjoy it.