To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story. Ursula K. LeGuin.

To put it in another way: Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functionning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story. Ursula K. LeGuin.

Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal espectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be the Wuthering heights.

 Ursula K. Le Guin