“Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art.”

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 95)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest te…" by Fritz Leiber?
Fritz Leiber photo
Fritz Leiber 67
American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction 1910–1992

Related quotes

A. C. Benson photo

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times — how to escape.”

A. C. Benson (1862–1925) English essayist, poet, author and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

Escape, and Other Essays (1915)

David Graeber photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo
John Hodgman photo
Chigozie Obioma photo

“That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me.”

Chigozie Obioma (1986) Nigerian writer

The fishermen (2015)

George Soros photo
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. photo

“I succeeded in making you care. If you feel nothing, I failed you as a storyteller. I love happy endings, but some readers need the darker stories, too. The stories that don’t make them feel disturbed by their own reality because it doesn’t reflect what they’re used to seeing in fiction. There’s some comfort in harsher stories, and witnessing how one character rebuilds after tragedy can provide hope for the reader.”

Adam Silvera (1990) American author

On what he aims for as a storyteller in “History Is All You Left Me Author Adam Silvera Talks Second Books and More with Nicola Yoon” https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/teen/history-left-author-adam-silvera-talks-second-books-nicola-yoon/ (Barnes & Noble; 2017 Jan 19)

Julian of Norwich photo

“I saw that two contrary things should never be together in one place. The most contrary that are, is the highest bliss and the deepest pain.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 72
Context: I saw that two contrary things should never be together in one place. The most contrary that are, is the highest bliss and the deepest pain. The highest bliss that is, is to have Him in clarity of endless life, Him verily seeing, Him sweetly feeling, all-perfectly having in fulness of joy. And thus was the Blissful Cheer of our Lord shewed in Pity: in which Shewing I saw that sin is most contrary, — so far forth that as long as we be meddling with any part of sin, we shall never see clearly the Blissful Cheer of our Lord. And the more horrible and grievous that our sins be, the deeper are we for that time from this blissful sight. And therefore it seemeth to us oftentimes as we were in peril of death, in a part of hell, for the sorrow and pain that the sin is to us. And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life. But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us. But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer. For we are ordained thereto in nature, and get thereto by grace. Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.

Related topics