Quotes About Narrative

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes." ? Joseph Stalin

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Story, it turns out, is the assassin of despair.

Aztec religion practiced human sacrifice, understanding it to be both a form of oblation to the gods and a means of deification for the victims. The crucifixion therefore made a certain kind of sense by analogy and the cross was thus incorporated into this sacrificial narrative. Nahua (Aztec) converts could comprehend a crucified god, self-offered to a yet-higher deity.

Grace rose from her chair and Elizabeth too came to her feet. "I thought your arse would be sore by now," said Grace. "It is a bit." "You have to be careful when you ask the Irish to tell you a story.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

How to tell a story—how to make it go on and on to fill the time—how to get interested in it yourself so it would be interesting to your listeners, or listener—all that came back to me

Every time you become aware of yourself dropping into victim mode and make a more courageous choice, you rewrite the narrative. You raise your self-identity, elevate your self

Org dreams are nothing but random neural firings, spurts of color and unprompted emotion. The story comes later, in that instant before waking, your muddled mind making sense of the chaos by stringing the randomness into a narrative.

History is filled with fictional people.

Things you make up bleed into things tha' definitely happened. Like describin' an event, an actual occasion. You add to it, you take things out. You forget exact details. I don't think it's dishonest.

Russians like the rest of us prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain away troubling events such as brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin as necessary stages on the path to greatness.

The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today's audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?

The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense—how action releases tension instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don't care about are happening constantly.

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion.

How many people get their stories right from day to day?

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories – your life, my life, old Husain's life, they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.

One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated. You must. We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It's very important. Maneck smiled. Why is it important? Mr. Valmik's eyes grew wide. You don't know? It's extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world.

what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character