Up: [[Story]] Created: 2025-01-12 Updated: 2026-02-08 > [!Orbit] Martin Shaw > First thing we gotta do is trail the stories not trap them. If you trap a story, you’ve put it in a little allegorical cage where you pretend you know what it means. The moment you think you know what the story means from beginning to end, it’s lost its nutrition, it’s lost its protein, it’s lost its danger. > [!Orbit] Clarissa Pinkola Estes in *Women who Run with the Wolves* > Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story…shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women. (p. 20) > [!Orbit] Niall Williams in *This is Happiness* > …Ganga (narrator’s grandfather) loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realize you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way. (p. 50) > [!Orbit] Jean Houston > By Great Story I mean story that enables us to see patterns of connections, as well as symbols and metaphors to help us contain and understand our existence… Story is living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of human growth. > [!Orbit] Mary Van Hook, social worker > Stories don’t mirror life, they shape it. > [!Orbit] Ben Okri in *A Way of Being Free* > Stories…are living things; and their real life begins when they start to live in you. Then they never stop living, or growing, or mutating, or feeding the ground well of imagination, sensibility, and character. (p. 35) > [!Orbit] Arthur W. Frank in *The Wounded Storyteller: Body, illness and ethics* > People tell stories not just to. work out their own changing identities, but also to guide others who will follow them. They seek not to provide a map that can guide others — each must create his own — but rather to witness the experience of reconstructing one’s own map. (p. 53)