I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung. Susan Griffin
About This Quote

In our everyday lives, we barely know anything about our past. In fact, many of us don’t even know who our grandfathers were, much less the history of the whole world. However, when we hear a secret from someone else’s family, something from their past comes alive for us. We feel connected to the people who share the secret.

We may also learn things about our own families that we never knew before. As in this quote, in order to live in fullness, in order to know ourselves and others, we must share our stories with one another.

Source: A Chorus Of Stones: The Private Life Of War

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  1. The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events...
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