We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. - Hemingway, Ernest

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. - Hoffer, Eric

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. - Chandler, Raymond