Story Plays to the Universal Desire

"Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to the universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 346

Stories are Fundamental

"Stories are fundamental to being human.  Without stories, life would appear as a meaningless jumble of facts and ideas.  Stories make facts, and great ideas, meaningful.  They connect with the everyday life and experience of their listeners or readers."

- David Masters blog entry "Campfire Writing: Why Stories are the Writer’s Elemental Tool"

Literature Irrigates the Deserts

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

- C.S. Lewis

Story Gives Life Meaning

"Classical story design charts the vast interconnectedness of life from the obvious to the impenetrable, from the intimate to the epic, from individual identity to the international infosphere. It lays bare the network of chain-linked causalities that, when understood, gives life meaning."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 52

This is a great quote that can be paraphrased to "story gives life meaning." Perhaps it is not that simple, but I believe that story has a lot to say about the nature of reality.

This Life Has Been a Test

"This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do."

- Angela on My So-Called Life

Life is Complex

"Your life experience is part of a much more complex system, and only you can figure it out."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 49

photo credit McGun

We Need Story

"We need other people’s well-composed stories and insights to free us from our own habits, and we also need to see that we can read consciously, that there is a conversation between literature and life, our life."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 99

Life is Too Short

“I want to start with a single proposition: a single human lifetime is far too short a period in which to discover how to live a life.”
- Bond, D. Stephenson, Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambala, 1993 pg 30

We live for an awfully long time. Yet, time always seems to be our enemy. I know that when I was in university that I did my best in all of my subjects. I struggled with writing essays and assignments but I noticed that I got better with it over the years. It came to the point where I realized that I finally knew how to write an essay. This thought came to me around the time of my graduation. If I could go back now, and apply all that I have learned, I could do a much better job.

Search for Meaning

"What is this force that drives us far from the comfort of the familiar and makes us take up challenges instead, even though we know that the glory of this world is only transitory? I believe this impulse is called the search for the meaning of life. Over many years of seeking a definitive answer to this question in books, art and science, and in both the dangerous and easy paths I have followed, I have found many answers. I am convinced now that a definitive answer will never be given to us in this life, but that, at the last, at the moment when we stand once more before the Creator, we will understand each opportunity that was offered to us." - Paulo Coelho, acceptance speech delivered to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (from Life: Selected Quotations)

I came across this book quite by accident while at the library. It is basically a commonplace book of one author's work, Paulo Coelho. I have only read one of his books, The Alchemist, but it was amazing. I bought it after reading it, and reread it with a pencil. It is now full of underlines and notes.