A Quote by Terence McKenna

People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.
The new century has brought on its own terrible dangers, which although not reaching the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War, still have the capacity to shake our world.
Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Other centuries had their driving forces. What will ours have been when men look far back to it one day? Maybe it won't be the American Century, after all. Or the Russian Century or the Atomic Century. Wouldn't it be wonderful, Phil, if it turned out to be everybody's century, when people all over the world--free people--found a way to live together? I'd like to be around to see some of that, even the beginning.
When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.
Back in the day, Barry Crump not only had these stories that talked about that kind of rustic personality, but also, he spoke volumes, I guess, of the relationships in the stories that he told in these books.
Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths - paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation.
Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.
I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world's people. This condition started in the 15th and the 16th centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people.
Now I have new stories and I feel refreshed. There is talk of Bobby's World eventually coming back. I would be happy to do that.
In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.
Writers 'get started' the day they are born. The minds they bring into the world with them are the amazing machines their stories will come out of, and the more they feed into it, the richer those stories will be.
My idea is to make moves to bring chess back to the world's map, to make it part of the world's geography again.
Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God--experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.
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