Quotes About Narrative

The aim of his narrative is to remind all not to judge people without knowing their story. Even the worst of villains has a story that perhaps explains their actions, without condoning them.

In Vyasa's tale, that which seeks is visualised as male; that which is sought is female. The feeder is male; the food is female. The male creates life outside itself; the female creates life within itself. The being was the feeder, hence male, and the world around was food, hence female.

Devdutt Pattanaik

More often than not, what is passed off as history is mythology, someone's understanding of truth shaped by memory, feelings and desire, available facts notwithstanding.

The Gita we overhear is essentially that which is narrated by a man with no authority but infinite sight (Sanjaya) to a man with no sight but full authority (Dhritarashtra). This peculiar structure of the narrative draws attention to the vast gap between what is told (gyana) and what is heard (vi-gyana).

Juno MacGuff: Wise move. I know this girl who had a huge crazy freakout because she took too many behavioral meds at once. She took off all her clothes and jumped into the fountain at Ridgedale Mall and she was like, "Blaaaaah! I'm a kraken from the sea!" Su-Chin: That was you.

The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home.

As he read the long narrative poem, Lewis was struck by two qualities in particular. He admired the realism of Tolkien's sub-created world, the depth and detail of Middle-earth. He also praised the mythical value of the story, the way the events were good in themselves and yet also suggested deeper layers of meaning to the reader. But

Perhaps now that she'd told the story, it would lose its power over her. She hoped she would never have to repeat it to anyone ever again.

veteran—or so she claimed—of

You have to start by changing the story you tell yourself about getting older... The minute you say to yourself, 'Time is everything, and I'm going to make sure that time is used the way I dream it should be used,' then you've got a whole different story.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.

The earliest biography of Cranmer, probably conceived within a few hours of his death, began the villain narrative: Bishop Cranmer's Recantacyons by Cardinal Pole's Archdeacon of Canterbury and diocesan official Nicholas Harpsfield. 1 Written in Latin for an international audience, it effectively invents a new genre, anti-martyrology:

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all.

All of this occurs in the past, except this sentence.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.