41 Quotes by Jonathan Gottschall

The average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours – one-third of our lives on earth – spinning fantasies.

We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.

Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.

We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with ‘Once upon a time.’

Story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life.

If someone breaks into your home when you’re there – that is, they don’t wait to be sure that the house is empty – it’s a bad situation. Honor doesn’t come into it at all. Anything you need to do to survive at that point becomes A-OK.

There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.

Story – sacred and profane – is perhaps the main cohering force in human life. A society is composed of fractious people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond our kinship ties? Story. As John Gardner puts it, fiction “is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.

Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.