Richard Kearney > Quotes

“Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living.
There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.”
― Richard Kearney, On Stories

“If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.”
― Richard Kearney, On Stories

“While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.”
― Richard Kearney, On Stories

“The storied self knows that self is not enough.”
― Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-modern

“If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.”
― Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-modern

“If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.”
― Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-modern

“Everything, it seems, revolves on this reversibility of higher and lower case It/it. The miracle consists in the transubstantiation of higher into lower, extraordinary into ordinary, transcendence into immanence. And vice versa. It is a moment both kenotic (the emptying of Word into flesh) and eucharistic (the celebration of the infinite in the finite bread and wine of quotidian experience).”
― Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God

“The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence.”
― Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God

“Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.”
― Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-modern

“Otherness is a horizon of selfhood.”
― Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters