The Stories We Tell Quotes

“All human creativity is an echo of God’s creativity. When God makes man, he forms him in the dirt, breathes life into him, and sends him out in the world. We’ve been playing in the dirt ever since. Just as God took something he’d made, shaped it, breathed life and meaning into it, and transformed it into something new, so we set about our own business, taking creation, shaping it, and giving it new meaning and purpose. Clay becomes sculpture. Trees become houses. Sounds are arranged in time to become music. Oils, pigments, and canvas are arranged to become paintings. Various metals, glass, and petroleum products become iPhones. The same is true of stories. There is nothing new under the sun, and our stories—no matter how fresh and new they might feel—are all a way of “playing in the dirt,” wrestling with creation, reimagining it, working with it, and making it new. Our stories have a way of fitting into the bigger story of redemption that overshadows all of life and all of history. Because that bigger story is the dirt box in which all the other stories play.”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“Storytelling is a great gift because humanity is a great gift, something God himself delights in.”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“We tell stories because we’re broken creatures hungering for redemption,”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“Pornography is a way of democratizing the quest for sexual fulfillment, making a pantheon of sexuality available for everyone. It is also a kind of sad, pathetic effort at redemption. It is a religious event, where sacrifices are made of money and dignity, and the god of fornication promises to the priests (the porn stars and filmmakers) fame and wealth, and to the acolytes (the consumers) a transcendent and satisfying sexual experience, something “hot,” “raw,” and “real” that is otherwise unavailable in their ordinary and often lonesome lives. But again, it’s only as satisfying as a meal, and the appetite will need to be fed again and again.”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“Sin unleashes generations of suffering on the world, and its results are complex, leaving individual motivations murky and hard to discern. Its”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“I do not look at our stories as allegories or metaphors. Instead, I look at them as evidence of longing and desire. They”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“The mistake is to think that we’re rational enough to overcome the power of these images and stories. Consider,”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“Our stories in movies and TV are liturgical in the sense that they tell stories of ultimate hope. They gather us with a song (opening credits) and send us out with a rejoinder to return next week (“Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode”). In between these bookends, they present problems and solutions.”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

“Few of the great figures in the Old Testament are worthy of much respect based upon their own virtues. From Genesis onward we see lies, drunkenness, sexual failures, prostitution, idolatry, and more. The impulse to whitewash these characters is misguided, based on a moralistic way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian. They were failures, messy men and women whose lives matter eternally because they inherited God’s promises, not because they lived lives of unbending faithfulness. If we try to frame them all as moral heroes, we end up projecting that expectation onto ordinary Christians, and we lose an important core fact of the gospel: it’s an announcement that frees sinners from the bondage of their failure and the tyranny of a standard they can never live up to.”
― Mike Cosper, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth