From William Kittredge's Who Owns the West? (Mercury House, 1996):
"Many of us...lose track of the story of ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act."
"It isn't any fun, and it doesn't just happen to people; it happens to entire societies. Stories are places to live, inside the imagination. We know a lot of them, and we're in trouble when we don't know which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit doesn't work anymore and we stick with it anyway."
"We live in stories. What we are is stories...."
"We need to inhabit stories that encourage us to pay close attention. We need stories that will encourage us towards acts of the imagination that in turn will drive us to the arts of empathy, for each other and for the world. We need stories that will encourage us to understand that we are part of everything, that the world exists under our skins, and that destroying it is a way of killing ourselves. We need stories that will drive us to care for one another and for the world. We need stories that will drive us to take action."
"[C]omplexity is actual."
Indeed.