Quote

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

William Kittredge

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William Kittredge
Age: 88 †
Born: 1932
Born: August 14
Died: 2020
Died: December 4
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Oregon
Make
Helping
Crazy
Unspeakable
World
Tell
Trouble
Identify
Stories
Ways
Sensible
Live
Talk
Main
Without
Help
Recognize
Trying
Making
Otherwise
Believe
Lives
Valuable
Way
Often
Hold
Demonic

More quotes by William Kittredge

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I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.
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In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.
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We continually use stories to hold up as mirrors to ourselves.
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One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.
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They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.
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What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house.
William Kittredge
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It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.
William Kittredge
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In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.
William Kittredge
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Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
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A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.
William Kittredge
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We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.
William Kittredge
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The specific danger is us we are rampant this earth is our only friend we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back.
William Kittredge
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Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?
William Kittredge
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It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
William Kittredge
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Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we’ll get it right.
William Kittredge