The Wounded Storyteller Quotes

“Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“If we lived in a less healthist, capitalist, and hierarchical society, which spent less time finding ways to exclude and disenfranchise people and more time finding ways to include and enhance the potentialities of everyone, then there wouldn’t have been so much for me to overcome”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“The past is remembered with such arresting lucidity because it is not being experienced as past; the illness experiences that are being told are unassimilated fragments that refuse to become past, haunting the present.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“Nancy Mairs writes that calamities “have a genius of their own.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“Broyard concludes that “it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“Reflection on memory makes the self an object of wonder—an astonishment previously reserved for the contemplation of the world.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“The pedagogy of suffering means that one who suffers has something to teach, just as Gail claims, and thus has something to give, as Mairs recognizes.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics