Ten Stories that I read or watched in 2012 that made a mark on me.

1. “The world isn't just the way it is.
It is how we understand it, no?
And in understanding something,
we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?”
Yann Martel
Life of Pi

2. “I had very good eyes once. Though
it's another thing to say what I saw.
In my experience, it is entirely
possible to watch something happen
and not to see it at all.”
Anna Funder
All That I Am

3. “When it all goes quiet
behind my eyes, I see everything
that made me flying around in
invisible pieces.”
Benh Zeitlin
& Lucy Alibar
Beasts of the
Southern Wild

4. ”So many words get lost. They leave
the mouth and lose their courage,
wandering aimlessly until they are
swept into the gutter like dead
leaves. On rainy days, you can hear
their chorus rushing past.”
Nicole Krauss
The History
of Love

5. “The human world is made of
stories, not people. The people
the stories use to tell themselves
are not to be blamed.”
David Mitchell
Ghostwritten

6. “Telling the story of who she was,
[she realized] that she was no longer
the same person. That she had made a
mistake, and the mistake had changed
her, and now she would not make the
mistake again because she had become
someone else, someone less afraid,
someone more compassionate.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for
the Dead

7. “Tengo decided to discard the manuscript
he had written thus far and start a
brand-new story from scratch. He closed
his eyes and, for a long time, listened
closely to the dripping of the little
spring inside him. Eventually the words
began to come naturally to him. Little
by little, taking all the time he
needed, he began to form them into
sentences.”
Haruki Murakami
1Q84

8. “Nothing comes from nothing...
no story comes from nowhere;
new stories are born from old
—it is the new combinations that
make them new.”
Salman Rushdie
Haroun and the
sea of stories

9. “Stories in their fullness are beyond
telling. They arc from here into spaces
beyond words and things, where stories
do not dwell...Only fragments are left
to us to make structures out of, that
please and hint and delight us through
the labyrinth. Fragments glimpsed in
the invisible book of life.”
Ben Okri
Starbook

10. “Just by living
we
change
the world.”
Anne Michaels
The Winter
Vault

11. Collected by
Nick Potter
www.storypot.co.nz