Quotes About Narrative

Lurid tales are the South's principal export. - Rhett Butler

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.

Every story began with the same claim: "If you hear the first part, you'll want to hear the second. If you hear the story today, you'll come back tomorrow for another. If you hear the story tonight, you'll think about it as you sleep.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

A novel is more a symphony, opera, oratorio. It exists in time, it goes by you a sound dying out as you write on, so that it is very hard to keep in touch with the whole thing...

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

All people are natural story-tellers. We tell a story every time we tell someone what we did that day or share an opinion of our favorite movie. If you want to be a story-teller, good job, you already are one!

It's been said that history is told by the victors.

I wanted to get it all down on paper; a record of what happened----just in case something did happen to me---- and to try and convince myself that I was not living in a state of permanent delusion. But why should you accept this story as given? It's just a story----my story. And like all stories, it isn't, in the pure sense of the word, true. It's just my version of the truth. Which means it is----and isn't----true at all.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody's ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

With regard to women's rights and sexual-minority rights, and, of course, in particular when it came to the issue of racism, everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better.

The 'rise of the far-right' in particular is such a trope in journalism that the far-right is said to be rising even when it is collapsing, as it did in Britain during the last decade.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

One of the most important things we can learn from Scripture is how to see ourselves accurately in the story in which we find ourselves. What story is God telling, and how does it concern us?

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

I have often told people that they need to evaluate their lives by the video, and not by the snapshot. That is, they should not just look at one moment in time, but rather consider trajectories, tendencies, and narrative arc as well.

Each one writes history according to his convenience.

All of my stories are true, and some of them actually happened.

How a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street, Grows into a story that no one can beat

The 2001 season, you couldn't go write that script because nobody would believe you.

Lives are like novels. Plot, character, and tone are all part of the devices we employ: Aim to be a contributor and not a detractor to the story.