There’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is your mother’s story. Hers is where yours began.

In the Hebrew Bible, the sixth of the Ten Commandments brought down the mountain by Moses is ‘Honour your mother and father’. Many people throughout history have felt this guilt-inducing commandment the hardest to keep. What does it even mean today? Love? Approval? What if, to quote Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, this means, “to make peace with who our parents really are”?

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

To tell a story, is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, that children understand; their stories and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the water of their lives.

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

[Stories] connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

I think the idea of ordinary courage speaks to the importance of telling our stories. It is especially difficult to practice ordinary courage in today’s culture of shame – a culture full of fear, blame and disconnection…and is often a powerful incubator for issues like perfectionism, stereotyping, gossiping, and addiction.

Writer’s Declaration This is to declare that I see you. I know something of what it’s cost you to be here. I know the rewards that have come from what you have done. I acknowledge the pain that came from what you attempted to or what was done to you. I am here to honour you by being your witness

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution -- more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Our parents can show us a lot of things: they can show us how we are to be and what things we ought to strive for, or they can show us how not to be and what things we ought to stray from, then you may have the kind of parents that show you all the things about you that you want to get rid of and you realize those traits aren't yours at all but are merely your parents' marks that have rubbed off onto you.

In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.

When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently towards what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

And yet our means of making a clearing through the chaos of events matter as much as, if not more than, the events themselves. The best of our stories are those that transform and redeem us, ones that both ground us in ourselves by reminding us what it means to be human and elevate us by furnishing an instrument of self-transcendence.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel towards pursuing it.

And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.

Somebody asked me earlier if I thought it was really important to tell stories about women's struggles. And I said yes, but at the same time, it's also important to tell stories about women's triumphs, women being slackers, women being criminals, women being heroes.

When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.