Quotes About Narrative

I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.

All remembrance of things past is fiction.

Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about.

That has nothing to do with the story.

As he had originally planned to do, Hemingway took the external details of the story and presented them from the point of view of the fisherman. He thus made it possible for the reader to participate imaginatively in the story. That effect was always Hemingway's primary aim as a writer.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.

Believe in the reader and they can connect the dots, if you succeed breathe life into the story

When you pick a partner, you pick a story. So what kind of story are you going to write? You are the editors of your life stories. Write well and edit often. And remember ... a life story is not a love story. You can love a lot more people than you can make a life with.

the moment the affair is revealed, the narrative will irrevocably switch. It will no longer be a story of self-discovery, but one of betrayal. I am not sure what they have to gain from that.

Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the "internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self," as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

We are willing to concede that the future is unpredictable, but we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the "internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self," as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.

The human animal is remarkably adept at seeing itself as the hero, no matter what the story.

Human life is fiction's only theme.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.

The set of outline notes of our poorer sermons, however, will likely reveal that they were shaped by the nature of their substantive content, not by the process of the narrative experience that is anticipated.

It is indeed The Story, and our task is to tell it, to form it, to fashion it—not to "organize" it.

A sermonic idea is a homiletical bind; a sermon is a narrative plot!

What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. [179]

In the end, life becomes literature, and literature has meaning because life has meaning.

And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.