Quotes About Narrative

There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.

Suffering is a form of egoism. I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine). (Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

I myself cannot construct my love story to the end. I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: *This is who I am.* This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebuilding-- I am *light*

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: This is what I am. This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding - I am light.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

Historiquement, le discours de l'absence est tenu par la Femme : la Femme est sédentaire, l'Homme est chasseur, voyageur; la Femme est fidèle (elle attend), l'homme est coureur (il navigue, il drague). C'est la Femme qui donne forme à l'absence, en élabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps ; (…)

Moj život je neprekidna digresija, od kolevke pa do moga groba.

A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.

A happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.

There are only two real people in fiction – the storyteller and the listener

He finished his story with a little facial shrug, part Yankee modesty, part genuine perplexity. As in, how did that happen?

After the apology the narrative cut to the then-current chase, which seemed to be equal parts political, legal, and deranged.

In the tall tales told by firelight there was always a brief and laconic conversation.

But because Lowrey's stories were usually very long. He fancied himself a raconteur. And he liked background. And context. Deep background, and deep context.

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

Well, we all hold history differently inside us. For Swede such episodes retold themselves into a seamless and momentous narrative; she had a Homeric grasp on the significance of events, and still does; one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? (Perhaps it is, but I suspect she's not actually counting on me for an answer.)

If sign and image are central to the New Testament, then it has to be read as a kind of narrative poetry. In the Scripture, we encounter types and symbols and emblems of transfiguration, and that is how the early Church, which created the New Testament, understood its own creation.

Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.

The enfleshing of the words of God is not done. The Word became flesh so that now, our flesh can become word. God is writing his story through the details of our lives as well.

Stories were power. And whoever controlled the story controlled everything. A story could bring people together, or it could tear them apart. It could spread like a sickness, infecting people. It could lead them into battle or shake them into seeing what they had refused to see before.