“We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.”
Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 1 (p. 34)
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Maureen Corrigan 5
American journalist and writer 1955Related quotes
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”
Source: The Library at Night
“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.”
Variant: I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.
Source: Rising Strong
Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)
Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 174
Context: Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.