
“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”
Source: Ordinary Heroes
Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”
Source: Ordinary Heroes
“The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”
Source: her
As quoted in "The Farewell director Lulu Wang on being caught between worlds" in Fader (16 August 2019) https://www.thefader.com/2019/08/16/the-farewell-director-lulu-wang-interview
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
As quoted in The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. This appears as part of a statement in a 1957 interview where she speaks of a friend's comments about her:
I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
Paraphrased variant : All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.