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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
– Joan Didion

Related Quotes:

  1. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive. – Joan Didion
  2. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive. – Joan Didion
  3. Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel – Joan Didion
  4. The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order. – Henry Miller
  5. Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves. – Clancy Martin
  6. Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. – Joan Didion
  7. The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried. – Joan Didion
  8. [P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. – Joan Didion
  9. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. – Joan Didion
  10. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. – Joan Didion
  11. Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. – Joan Didion
  12. Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. – Joan Didion
  13. Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he? – Joan Didion
  14. Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. – Joan Didion
  15. I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world. – Joan Didion
  16. Memories are what you no longer want to remember. – Joan Didion
  17. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them – Joan Didion
  18. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card. – Joan Didion
  19. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. – Joan Didion
  20. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come. – Joan Didion
  21. The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language. – Joan Didion
  22. I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. – Joan Didion
  23. …the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult. – Joan Didion
  24. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. – Joan Didion
  25. Letter make words. Words make stories. And stories can be changed with strong enough magic. – Joan Holub
  26. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared. – Jim Crace
  27. Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe? – Scott Turow
  28. Stories arrest us. Parents use stories to capture the attention of active children. Preachers use stories to capture the attention of sleepy adults. – Tony Reinke
  29. People need stories…we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books. – Jennifer Chiaverini
  30. Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates. – Christy Hall
  31. We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful. – Marc Aug
  32. Tell yourself the stories you need to tell. But don’t be fooled by them. Never live your own lies. – David Gaider
  33. Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are. – Albert Camus
  34. If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you. – Joan Powers
  35. Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you who you think you are. Tell me what you fear, and I’ll tell you who you really are. – Brunonia Barry
  36. We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. – Judith Butler
  37. Once upon a time, a king came to earth to tell stories, and the stories contained the mystery of eternal life. – Jared C Wilson
  38. We all tell our stories the way we want to. And sometimes those stories have nothing to do with reality. – Danielle Ganek
  39. We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom. – Sharon Salzberg
  40. we compose our life in stories we tell ourselves – John Geddes

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