Jonathan Gottschall QUOTES

1 " Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

2 " Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

3 " Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

4 " Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand. "

― Jonathan Gottschall

5 " Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. This is part of what Marshall McLuhan had in mind with his idea of the global village. Technology has saturated widely dispersed people with the same media and made them into citizens of a village that spans the world. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

6 " This need to see ourselves as the striving heroes of our own epics warps our sense of self. After all, it's not easy to be a plausible protagonist. Fiction protagonists tend to be young, attractive, smart, and brave - all of the things that most of us aren't. Fiction protagonists usually live interesting lives that are marked by intense conflict and drama. We don't. Average Americans work retail or cubicle jobs and spend their nights watching protagonists do interesting things on television, while they eat pork rinds dipped in Miracle Whip. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

7 " We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

8 " The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

9 " Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape. "

― Jonathan Gottschall

10 " Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

11 " There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

12 " Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

13 " As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, “Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

14 " Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

15 " fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness.” Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: “The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

16 " At my local big-box bookstore, the gun nut, muscle head, and martial arts magazines are all shelved together in what I call the “masculine anxiety” section. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

17 " When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

18 " Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment...But it's hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling... Our various fictional worlds are-- on the whole-- horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles-- in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

19 " Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

20 " The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn’t be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn’t make the face boring or mean that particular faces can’t startle us with their beauty or distinctiveness. "

― Jonathan Gottschall , The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

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