Meaning is different from happiness. Included in meaning is poverty and other unhappy states…Our greatest desire, greater even than the desire for happiness, is that our lives mean something. This desire for meaning is the originating impulse of story. We tell stories because we hope to find or create significant connections between things. Stories link past, present, and future in a way that tells us where we have been (even before we were born), where we are, and where we could be going. Our stories teach us that there is a place for us that we fit, they suggest to us that our lives can have a plot. Stories turn mere chronology, one thing after another, into the purposeful action of plots, and thereby into meaning.

—The Healing Power of Stories, Daniel Taylor, 1996

Our niche in the great order of things is to appreciate, to notice, to call attention to beauty, attention to need, attention to something we can do. Without us…there would be no one here to engage the story of it all.
—Storycatcher, Christina Baldwin, 2005

All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes. We become in that moment a guest in someone else’s life, and together with them sit at the feet of their teacher. The meaning we may draw from someone’s story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn. No matter. Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.

— Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen, 1996