Quotes About Narrative

It can be very seductive to tell our story to others who will listen because, lets face it, who doesn't love to 'commiserate' (in this context, meaning to share their misery) with other likeminded people. It justifies our attachment to the drama. The interesting thing about telling our story over and over is that it becomes even more deeply ingrained in our minds each time we tell it, and the universe delights in keeping whatever we claim as our story alive.

I love stories with a happy ending," Inspector Me said.

You have no idea the power generated each time somebody is told a story. When a conscious, sentient mind willingly ignores what is real, what is fact, and instead chooses to invest in people and places that never existed...It's magnificent.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History .

Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.

Stories are the single most powerful tool in a leader's toolkit.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story.

Tell me a fact, and I'll learn. Tell me a truth, and I'll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

I learned that books could be collected, that they were important enough to keep and that a story that seemed to be over could be part of a bigger one.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.

We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie.

your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192

Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell... p.195

Life's a story don't you doubt. Bad times give you something to talk about.

a tale about America's first president not lying is itself apparently a lie.

Write non-fiction like fiction, so the reader is constantly turning the page to find out what happens next, and write fiction like non-fiction, so that when your character walks out of the donut shop and turns left into the nunnery, there really is a nunnery next door and not a muffler shop.

When you know how to find a story – when you know what a story looks like and where they hide – you see them everywhere.

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.