"The idea that we narrate our lives to ourselves, and that doing so is part of living well, is sufficiently commonplace that its most vocal critic, the philosopher Galen Strawson, could describe it as “a fallacy of our age.”"

"“I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form,” Strawson writes."

"We can use this irony to separate three elements in Life as Narrative and to extricate ourselves, a little, from the grip of failure."

"The first element is the conjecture, nicely verbed by Strawson, that we are bound to “story” ourselves, presenting our lives as coherent narrative wholes."

"The other elements are ethical: that a good life must form a coherent narrative, and that it must be one whose subject tells that narrative to himself."

"All three had lives that were dense with things worth doing, some done exceptionally well, along with miscues, misdirections, swerves. That’s enough for a good life, without the need for a story that ties it all together. To see one’s life as a narrative arc, heading for a climax that it may or may not reach, is to see it as a potential failure; but one need not live that way."

"It’s not that Murdoch’s life was incoherent—though the web of her affairs isn’t easy to unravel. But it didn’t have the kind of narrative structure proponents of Life as Narrative approve, the sort that has “an Agent, an Action, a Goal, a Setting, an Instrument—and Trouble.”"

"Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life."

"think the answer turns on the amorphous open-endedness of storytelling."

"They gravitate to stories of the simplest and most linear form."

"The claim is that you should, and do, aspire to tell the story of your life as a single, integrated arc, “something that swells and tautens until climax.”"

"As Alison observes, however, storytelling comes in countless forms, many of them nonlinear."

"If Life as Narrative meant only that there is value in seeing one’s life as a story with one or more of these endlessly various forms, it would be harmless enough."

"But in practice, Life as Narrative means a need for unity and linearity, for incidents that build to a fulfilling climax, won or lost; that’s what its proponents demand."

"What’s more, there is a downside to unified, linear narrative: it is by squeezing your life into a single tube that you set yourself up for definitive failure."

"But we have come to speak as if a person can be a failure—as though failure were an identity, not an event. When you define your life by way of a single enterprise, a narrative arc, its outcome will come to define you."

"“To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives … A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.”"

"The more you appreciate the sheer abundance of incident, the more you’ll see any life as an assortment of small successes and small failures, and the less prone you will be to say, despairingly, “I’m a loser”—or with misplaced bravado, “I’m a winner!” Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive."