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January 18 - January 28, 2021
THE SADDEST THING about life is you don’t remember half of it.
“You can’t get your life back.”
felt defensive, as though the scenes in my life weren’t going anywhere.
Without story, experiences are just random.”
He didn’t make self-deprecating comments the way I make self-deprecating comments
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but it’s obvious now that in creating the fictional Don, I was creating the person I wanted to be, the person worth telling stories about.
but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.
The thing about death is it reminds you the story we are telling has finality.
we were burying a good man, which feels different than burying an average man.
If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon;
“A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it,”
But I knew if we were going to tell a good story, it would have to involve risk.”
“No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her.
i play the role as hero, what does a hero deserve?
“spirit bound by flesh, held up by bone and trapped in time.”
We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.
Everything is and still is amazing. Have to be thankful.
I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.
It is our world to do as we please. Take advantage of it.
Not living a better story would be like deciding to die,
IF THE POINT of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
if the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.
A character is what he does.”
his story was better than mine for the simple fact that his story was actually happening.
and I wondered what a show might look like if a camera followed me around.
Hold your tongue; don’t talk about that person that way; forgive the friend you haven’t talked to; don’t look at that woman as a possession; I want to show you the sunset; look and see how short life is and how your troubles are not worth worrying about;
Our inner voice of wisdom.
like I was being a character somebody else wanted me to be and not who I actually was; but if I held my tongue, the scene would play better, and I always felt better when it was done.
when you are a better character, your story gets better too.
we change over time and our perspective sharpens with experience.
“You put something on the page,” he said. “Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”
People who live good stories are too busy to write about them.
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.
We knew he was going off on his story, probably to get hurt a little. We knew it would end well, but you don’t feel that when you push a character into his story. You only feel what he is feeling at that moment.
“The inciting incident is how you get them to do something,” Ben said. “It’s the doorway through which they can’t return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.”
humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story.
the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.
fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
progress, no matter how slow, is all that matters.
It’s true that while ambition creates fear, it also creates the story.
It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.
The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be,
If a story doesn’t have negative turns, it’s not an interesting story. A protagonist who understands this idea lives a better story.
the stuff I spent money on indicated the stories I was living.
The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.
“the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.”
The harder it is, the sweeter the reward.
The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.
as real-life protagonists we can control only what we do and say, what choices we make, what words we say.
It felt as though I was designing stories for us, not just me.
Him and his girlfriend.
The more difficult, the better the story.
The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else.
You become like the people you interact with. And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too.
Their story had given them their character.
he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy.
