Quotes About Narrative

The story is good how about you

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

When tension and immediacy combine, the story begins.

stories aren't ideas. They're not concepts or definitions. They're experience.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

The goals of the player are thus aligned with the goals of the protagonist; when the player succeeds, the protagonist succeeds. (...) The question is, can we imagine video games where this is inverted, such that when the player is successful, the protagonist fails? (...) Who would want to play Anna Karenina, the video game? Who would want to spend hours playing in order to successfully throw the protagonist under a train?

'A dog bites a man'—that's a story; 'A man bites a dog'—that's a good story...

Love? ... It's at the heart of every story.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

based on them, I was later to learn, make all sides involved in the war look even worse than we believed them to be at the time, including Western governments

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I'm

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I have often found myself wondering how many women writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfil this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them.

But when articles about the sexual infection rates of African American women are one column over from an article about young white women's spring break, a disturbing cultural narrative is reinforced--that "innocent" white girls are being lured into an oversexualized culture, while young black women are already part of it.

The question of who claimed defense rightly is usually decided by the victors, and sometimes only much later by more objective historians.

Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence.

The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.

The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.