Quotes About Narrative

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

Be honest about what you see, get out of the way and let the story reveal itself

and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

And in our dark days, with so many threatening clouds on the horizon, he concluded, we puff up a story like this to drug people, to distract their attention from the serious problems and divert them with a Romeo-and-Juliet story, one scripted, however, by a soap opera writer.

So you're like… living in the margins, making your case in the margins, trying to make a difference maybe, from the margins...but nobody really wants to listen to you. To see you. 'Cause you're not the story they want to tell.

It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle.

All fiction is about writing.

My book had a shape, an arc—though I was still incapable of describing what that arc plotted or argued for. As a collection of texts, it moved between poetry and fiction, between Los Angeles and New York. The book struggled, self-consciously, with narrative: how to put the things that made up my life, but also the lives of others, into the form of a story.

What a story this place will tell," she said.

In the wake of the Communist victory in 1949 and the CCP's subsequent decades of lavish self-praise as heroes of the anti-Japanese resistance, the Nationalist war effort has often been overlooked and denigrated.31

Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.

And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl.

But what people lie about the most are themselves, and these lies become the stories they believe and want to tell you.

Opinions only carry weight in the second or third person.

I'm always excited to carry more and more weight and responsibility within a story.

I think there's something really thrilling to having to get people laughing about something, and then, when you have them in that comfort space, you can drop the weight into the texture of the story.

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

Here's the weird thing about me. I was never one to tell you stories about me. I was always the guy who others told stories about. I was like that up until I was 35 years old. And then I started telling stories about me onstage.