Hannah Arendt Quotes

If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I think no one but me has the right to write about my life as I want to write it in a particular way. I don't think any other person will be able to tell the story of my life like how I have approached it. It works best when it's written by someone who has experienced it herself.

Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

I'm just basically telling a story of my life.

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I'm working on my life story. I'm not decided if it's going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Everybody has a purpose in this world.

Your life should be a story you are excited to tell.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

Don't think you haven't lived long enough to have a story to tell.

Instead of asking, “what do I want from life?,” a more powerful question is, “what does life want from me?

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.