IBM Research: Knowledge Socialization: Ideas: Quotes: Nature of Stories

Here's a quote from George Eliot's Adam Bede about how the words used are a poor indicator of the whole story (in this case, about two people beginning to feel an attraction to each other):

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language: and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound,", "stars," "music" -- words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will be rather like those little words, "light" and "music," stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past.

Leaving aside the sentimentality, consider how stories operate by using common-place, "unimposing" words to pull on the "long-winding fibres" of memory and shared understanding.

A fascinating quote from Nabokov (in The Gift) in which the main character, a poet, considers his book of poems:

Now he read in three dimensions, as it were, carefully exploring each poem, lifted out like a cube from among the rest and bathed from all sides in that wonderful, fluffy country air after which one is always so tired in the evening. In other words, as he read, he again made use of all the materials already once gathered by his memory for the extraction of the present poems, and reconstructed everything, absolutely everything, as a returning traveler sees in an orphan's eyes not only the smile of its mother, whom he had known in his youth, but also an avenue ending in a burst of yellow light and that auburn leaf on the bench, and everything, everything.

When I tell you a story, I contract the total of my experience as related to that subject into a more condense matter. Items particular to me are either excluded or explained, and items I can expect us to share ride along unstated, taking no space. When you read or hear the story, you re-expand it, making use of all the materials we share for the extraction of the story.