Story We Tell Ourselves Quotes

#1. 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.

Eleanor Brown

#2. There's no protecting anyone," Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. "Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

Ann Patchett

#3. There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

Ryan Holiday

#4. Our thoughts affect our agreement with reality, our story we tell ourselves. IF you want to change your story, start with your thoughts.

Tony Curl

#5. The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

Spike Jonze

#6. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

Cheryl Strayed

#7. Danger is real. Heartache is real. Fear is not. It's a story we tell ourselves.

Brianna Wiest

#8. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves ...

Cheryl Strayed

#9. What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

Mark Frost

#10. Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.

Noam Shpancer

#11. We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Rabih Alameddine

#12. If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature
even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe
has to change.

Janine Benyus

#13. The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.

Vikram Chandra

#14. The most difficult part of our stories is often what we bring to them - what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others. Yes, maybe we lost our job or screwed up a project, but what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value.

Brene Brown

#15. When we believe in our thoughts, when we tell ourselves a story, we suffer. 'My husband doesn't respect me.' 'I should be thinner.' Those are stories. When there's no story, there's no suffering.

Byron Katie

#16. In order for us to live comfortably with ourselves while living on unjust terms with others, we have to tell ourselves a story that makes us innocent.

Tobias Wolff

#17. The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.

David Whyte

#18. We choose perfumes for ourselves so we can tell the stories inside of us - the ones that we can't possibly put into words.

C. JoyBell C.

#19. We all begin with a story of ourselves that we believe to be true. But perhaps true personal change, even healing, can only happen when we change that narrative, when we begin to tell ourselves and others a different story. Surely

Thrity Umrigar

#20. Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn't mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn't mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves.

Ryan Holiday

#21. Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

Frederick Weisel

#22. The problem with the stigma around mental health is really about the stories that we tell ourselves as a society. What is normal? That's just a story that we tell ourselves.

Matthew Quick

#23. Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Siri Hustvedt

#24. Remember, the things with which we choose to surround ourselves tell our story. Let's hope it's not "I choose to live in the past," or "I can't finish the projects I start." Instead, let's aim for something like, "I live lightly and gracefully, with only the objects I find functional or beautiful.

Francine Jay

#25. We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves.

Denis Johnson

#26. Tell me that and we'll go. Right now. Save ourselves and leave this place to burn. Tell me that's how you want your story to go and we'll write it straight across the sand.

Alwyn Hamilton

#27. A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth.

Alexandra Curry

#28. how to think in the right genre?" "We already do it, every day. We tell ourselves what kind of story we're in, and we're often wrong, because life is mostly every genre, sometimes at once.

Michael R. Underwood

#29. It's not that there is no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not because it's necessarily the most absolutely truthful, but because it's a thing that we tell ourselves makes sense of the world, at least at this moment.

Michael Kimmelman

#30. Part of this whole Sleater-Kinney 2.0 is breaking the rules. We wanted to tell our story ... we feel like we need to stand up for ourselves.

Corin Tucker

#31. People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.

E. O. Wilson

#32. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

Miles Davis

#33. I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

Peter Orner

#34. By accepting what the external structures have told us we need to do, we have given the power of our realities and ourselves to others. It is time to tell a new story for women, and that can only start with women.

Zainab Salbi

#35. We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes, and a story we tell about ourselves.'
And what others say about us.

M T Anderson

#36. We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.

Randall Kennedy

#37. We all tell little lies about ourselves, Our past, our presents. We think some of them are minuscule, unimportant, And others, large and incriminating. But they are the same. Only God Has enough of the story to judge our souls.

Sarah McCoy

#38. I will tell you the story of how we found ourselves in a realm where dreams are formed, destiny is chosen, and magic is as real as a handprint in the snow.

Libba Bray

#39. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. But if we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us- we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.

Stephen Grosz

#40. We share good news, then, neither to show our neighbors why Christianity is "right" nor to save people from the corrupting influence of other religions, but to name the story that helps us tell the truth about ourselves.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

#41. I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#42. The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.

David Remnick

#43. What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Rabih Alameddine

#44. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#45. Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

Lionel Shriver

#46. Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

Ted Chiang

#47. A theory of everything is a palliative story just like reality was in The Matrix. Something we tell ourselves in order to armor ourselves from the frightening reality of how mediocre and pathetic we really are. While

James McGirk