For all practical purposes, soldiers in the field have the status of slaves, the prisoners of their grand illusions, their training, and their army.
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
The way you live your day is a sentence in the story of your life. Each day you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point.
Our unfathomable evolutionary past paints a picture vastly more immense than any spiritual story could ever create because it is raw and real, violent, dirty and beautiful—and because of that—it's spectacular!
A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
You can't change who you are, can you? That would require changing the people who made you along the way. That would mean discrediting everything they ever gave you.
Together, in that room, our childhood notions of love melted away. We discovered love was not a fairytale. Sometimes there were no happy endings, and when there were, you needed to work like hell to keep the happiness alive.
What was really unfair about the whole thing was that Oma Kristel hadn't so much exploded as spontaneously combusted. But Gossip is Baron Münchhausen's little sister, and never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.
I'd been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I'd stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn't think of writing anything else.
Cassiopeia? She was a queen long ago, in a different part of the world. The stories say she was very beautiful, but very proud. Too proud. She smack-talked some goddesses and got herself stuck up there for all eternity.
Language does this to our memories— simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft -told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
So the gods,” Moash said, nursing his own drink, “were pleased that you solved problems on your own . . . by going to other gods and begging them for help instead?” “Hush,” Rock said. “Is good story.
Wit smiled. "All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.
Too many codeine pills, Too many nights of cold chills Too many weak-handed deals Too many lives, the addict steals
We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.
There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.
She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.
I pawned the remote to my misery, trading it in for liquor that was cheap; screwdrivers for my vitamin c, and a little bloodstream to my IV, helping to soothe my lunacy
