stories

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.

Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man's mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the new-born world!It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same; and still our own bitter experience and heart-breaking regrets teach us to sympathize too feelingly with a tale like this.

Not every story is true. And sometimes the things that were wicked become the things that save us, and the things that were good doom us to misery and pain.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.

Grace will meet you in the valley, and her song will carry you home on the wind to another sky filled with ethereal beauty unfolding and love everlasting.

Book is the best friend, have no demand, no complain

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else__rants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today's writing falls into the first category.

It is a wonderful thing to be liked by a stranger, but without respect it is pointless. It is like pulling the pedals off a rose and throwing the stem at the person you like. It__ creepy, but had good intentions that suddenly experienced some strange form of verticillium wilt, during the climate change of their mood.

Every day sings its own song.

You paint the picture of your surroundings. Paint it beautifully.