The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are.

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.

And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

The internal psychological pressure to make up a story, to explain the ruins before one's eyes, is powerful indeed.

You are divine, you are perfect, but as an artist, you create your own story and you have the illusion that the story is real. You live your life by justifying that story. And by justifying the story, you are wasting your life.

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those that come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world.

Those who try to entrap others are often caught by their own schemes.

The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.

how many times has your mind taken a small piece of uncertain information and spun a story around it that ends up consuming your thoughts?

Whenever there’s a story happening, there’s more than one story happening.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.