Quotes About Narrative

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Isaiah Berlin argued, the kinds of descriptions that historians give of historical events wouldn't have made much sense to the people who actually participated in them.

feeling is the place every story starts.

Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction. In story, that somebody is the reader.

In general, the trick is to bring the past forward into the present, so that you describe what happens in past tense instead of past perfect.

And so it goes with words and language. They're tools. All your writing life, you work with them . . . using them to tie your reader to your story.

Your life is meant to be an epic story. How you think, perform and live today is part of that script.

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

I'm always looking in the lighting to tell the story in a different way than it actually looks in real life because it's, for me, more contrast sometimes has to mean it's softer than normal.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Real life has always let me down. That's why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one.

Life is like a B-movie. You don't want to leave in the middle of it, but you don't want to see it again.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

If you own this story you get to write the ending.

Mellow doesn't always make for a good story, but it makes for a good life.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Every life has a file, if you will.

Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident.

In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J. Braddock.