Quotes About Narrative

Whatever you write about me, don't make it sad.

Even knowing the ending was sad, I wouldn't have deprived myself the beauty of the story.

Omul e ca un roman: pân? la ultima pagin? nu È™tii cum se va termina. Altfel nici n-ar merita s? citeÈ™ti...

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Bandage any part of your body If people ask about it, make a story and tell If people do not ask about it, draw their attention to it and tell If people forget about it, remind them of it and keep telling. Do not talk about anything else

The fact is that man's mind is limited, and his understanding only partial. The biblical narrative makes this point unequivocally with respect to Moses, in reporting that he could not see God's face, but only his back.59 And it was no less true of the other prophets of Israel, who saw things in different ways because each of them was limited in his understanding, and to his own point of vantage.60

Today, though, we live in the aftermath of the shattering of Jewish faith, brought on in part by Western secularism and the Holocaust. Whatever faith has managed to survive our experiences in the modern world would be tested to the breaking point by the destruction of Israel. Few Jews, I suspect, would accept another narrative of Divine punishment. Even for many religious Jews, this would be one punishment too many.

Sometimes, in political arguments with Palestinians, I would be told: Why are we arguing about who owns the land, when in the end the land will own us both?

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month - that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years - that's religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.

The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion, and we are admonished not to call it "fake news" in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).

The universe just does not work like a story.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion,

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout

Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won't have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.

This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Like all cosmic stories, the liberal story too starts with a creation narrative. It says that the creation occurs every moment, and that I am the creator. What then is the aim of my life? To create meaning by feeling, by thinking, by desiring, and by inventing. Anything that limits the human liberty to feel, think, desire, and invent limits the meaning of the universe. Therefore liberty from such limitations is the supreme ideal.

How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

History isn't a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.