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41 " But when it comes to the villains and victimizers of history, we have a failure of empathetic imagination. "
― Jonathan Gottschall , The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down
42 " 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
43 " Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds. "
44 " bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story "
― Jonathan Gottschall
45 " A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”) "
46 " sometimes—maybe more often than not—amnesia is better than memory. "
47 " Narrative history, I propose, can be defined as the imposition of the imagination of the present on the defenseless corpse of the past. "
48 " The Russian blitzkrieg of narratives is among the most brilliant, devastating, and far-reaching propaganda attacks in history. It’s still not clear whether this "
49 " A story is always an artificial, post-hoc fabrication with dubious correspondence to the past. "
50 " Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story, our minds are churning, working hard. "
51 " Historical storytelling—not just in America but everywhere—frequently amounts to a kind of revenge fantasy, where the malefactors of our past can be resurrected, tried, and convicted for violating moral codes they frequently hadn’t heard of. "
52 " The world is spinning down a post-truth vortex of media bubbles, fake news, and feral confirmation bias. "
53 " We are all products of some combination of genetics and social conditioning, which means that our personal tendencies and traits are not self-built. "
54 " Bad people,” in the main, are simply those who had the misfortune first to encounter, and then to believe, the wrong storytellers. "
55 " bad information—so long as it makes a good story—tends to outcompete a dull story packed with high-quality information. "
56 " Of course, no one thinks that science, an institution run by flawed humans, is perfect. But it’s also true that even the harshest critics of science won’t claim that they’d prefer to return to a prescientific age. "
57 " Like any published memoir, our own life stories should also come with a disclaimer: “This story that I tell about myself is only based on a true story. I am in large part a figment of my own yearning imagination.” And it’s a good thing, too. As we will see, a life story is an intensely useful fiction. "
58 " Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly—to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story—comic, tragic, romantic—is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires. Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication "
59 " Because made-up stories tend to end happily, psychologists find that heavy fiction consumers, when compared to heavy news consumers, have greater confidence that they live in a “nice world” rather than a “mean world. "
60 " I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic. "