Quotes About Narrative

News in not what happened but a story about what happened.

unfamiliar lens; repeatedly, he takes the raw materials of life and reshapes them into teasing fragments of narrative. All that is missing is a plot where they can snap into place.

Dickens gave his readers history on a human scale.

Sunnie could talk to a dead body for an hour before she'd notice the person wasn't breathing, and likely finish her story even after she had.

According to the basic narrative of the Old Testament, God's answer to human dysfunction was the formation of a people after his own heart.

The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.

ever told. S'pose you've heard a lot of stories like

Throughout the narrative you will find many statements that are obviously nonsensical and quite at variance with common sense. For the most part these are true.

It was just a story about despair.

historian C. V Wedgwood, "History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."43

History is nothing but the lies we tell about our ancestors

Koopmans pointed out, traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events—that is, narrative. By incorporating an understanding of popular narratives into their explanations of economic events, economists will become more sensitive to such influences when they forecast the future.

The "technology is taking over our lives" narrative is the most recent incarnation of a labor-saving-machinery narrative that has scared people since the Industrial Revolution.

Narrative economics demonstrates how popular stories change through time to affect economic outcomes, including not only recessions and depressions, but also other important economic phenomena. The idea that house prices can only go up attaches to the stories of rich house flippers seen on television. The idea that gold is the safest investment attaches to stories of war and depression. These narratives have a contagious element, even if their attachment to any given celebrity is tenuous.

Rumor is the ancient Latin word for contagious narrative.

A loose generalization would have it that creation and destruction go hand in hand. But my destruction takes the form of trying to make an old story work, for instance having almost to destroy the old story to tell it anew. The Odyssey is an oldie. Which I try to tell on dry land, so to speak, in The Studhorse Man. You see, the old stories, instead of illuminating the world, sometimes stop us from seeing it. It's like a pair of glasses that don't quite fit any longer.

Yet why not say what happened?

History does not unfold: it piles up.

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

As Aristotle tells us: "For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand questions and shaping them into story is our overwhelming creative task.