Quotes About Narrative

Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.

The real issue for the public is to figure out which narrative do we want. We can have a bigger government, if that's the public's choice. It'll just require higher taxes on every American. Do you want that, or do you want smaller government, smaller taxes?

You look at Taylor Swift, and every 'i' is dotted, every story is finished.

I'm fantastic at cooking up stories. In the kitchen, I can, at best, make tea and a badly shaped dosa.

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

There's only so many times you can write the story about the gay teammate.

Well. I guess some people write the stories, and others live them.

The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony's deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

Cornelius Ryan, whose A Bridge Too Far remains the classic narrative of the battle, put total Allied losses at 17,000 in nine days.

Charles B. MacDonald, the author of the Army's official account, described the retreat:

There are no new stories in nature, only new observers.

It is easy to tell a stranger's story; I didn't know if I had the guts to tell my own.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Folks believe the side of the story that suits 'em.

I'm writing this story, not you, so shut up.

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves, how they want them told, they are going to have to make them, they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it, Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.

Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

Stories don't have points. They're lies for keeping the truth in. They're sort of rounded, not pointy at all.