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1 " The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand. "
― , The Triumph of Narrative
2 " To discover we have no story is to acknowledge that our existence is meaningless, which we may find unbearable "
3 " When we make stories, when we turn raw events into personal sagas, parables, tales, and anecdotes, we are often struggling to come to terms with one of the inescapably difficult and puzzling facts of existence. Storytelling is an attempt to deal with and at least partly contain the terrifyingly haphazard quality of life. Large parts of life, sometimes the mots crucial parts, depend on random happenings, contingency. A woman turns a corner, meets a strange man, two years later they marry, they have children together – and in twenty years, there are adults walking the earth who would not have existed if that woman had not turned that corner on that day. The human results of that apparently random event may go on for hundreds or even thousands of years, a single stray moment casting its shadow into an unimaginably long future. We can gaze on this fact with wonder; but we may also grow uneasy in contemplating it, because it emphasizes how little we control the course of our lives "
4 " Stories, in order to become stories, must be simplified, stripped of extraneous detail and vagrant feeling "
5 " A story has shape, outlines, limits; an experience blurs at the edges and tends to merge imperceptibly with related experiences. In many cases, experiences are what happens to us, whereas stories happen to other people "
6 " A master narrative always speaks with the confidence of unalterable and unassailable truth – and yet paradoxically, it is always in the process of being altered…A master narrative that we find convincing and persuasive differs from other stories in an important way: it swallows us. It is not a play we can see performed, or a painting we can view, or a city we can visit. A master narrative is a dwelling place. We are intended to live in it "