Quotes About Narrative

People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn't over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

Can your story be retold? Can all of the various things that have happened to you and the things you have done you'd prefer to never think about again and the embarrassing parts and the painful parts—can all of it be retold in such a way that the worst parts become the most powerful, poignant parts?

He heard something? That's the best the writer can do? That's so vague. Ambiguous. Fuzzy. Exactly. Sometimes the most powerful truths in a story are the ones that are never explicitly stated.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

Who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?

Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible's narrative art.

All lives are interesting – how interesting depends on the telling

The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy).

The great gulf between the story told by the young reporters and the story that military people knew as their truth may be the reason that, almost a half century later, the Vietnam War remains the source of a cultural rift in America. Today a small but growing group of writers is looking back and finding a different story than the one told by many reporters of the day.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

Storytelling typically happens blindly fast. When we believe we're at risk, we tell ourselves a story so quickly that we don't even know that we're doing it.

There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

I just think these people, everything they've been through, we should respect them... By 'we', I mean people like Timur and me. The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them... I'm rambling.

Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one. Don't either of you ask me for more. It's late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you and I. You will need your sleep tonight. And you too, Abdullah. I am counting on you, boy, while your sister and I are away. So is your mother. Now. One story, then. Listen, both of you, listen well. And don't interrupt.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one. Don't either of you ask me for more.

Sad stories make good books.

But the most impressive thing about your story is that it has irony.

Well, people need stories to divert them at difficult times like this.

Ah, a storyteller," the general said. "Well, people need stories to divert them at difficult times like this.