Quotes About Narrative

The story is the important thing.

A story with a clear ending, happy or sad, is an acceptable story.

Most stories, especially difficult ones, are a mix of truth and lies.

That is what stories can do, they can push the feeble disorders we live with out of sight.

I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.

Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Abraham Verghese

a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Stories are factual...If a man and his story are in conflict it is the man who must change.....In America it is the man who matters not the story.

She and I were storytellers. Swapping stories constituted our good times. That's what sustained our marriage until, I guess, stories weren't enough.

what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

Where we are from," he said, "stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in

They only care about the story we're going to tell, and that story will be useful to them or it won't. When they ask you what happened to our flag and portraits, what story are you going to tell them?

For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. Perhaps they will believe your story and perhaps not, but you, Jun Do, they will believe you.

For us, the story is more important than the person.

Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.