We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.

The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a life meaningful either.

the times we worked harder to make the day stand out. our story demanded that we change and so we did.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

I'm just trying to make the point that the story we're telling ourselves is often very different from the story we're telling the people around us.

And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

The heart responds to the conflict within a story.