Quotes About Narrative

We tell the real truth of our life by the stories we repeatedly tell.

That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I'd find inconsistencies.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way.

I hoped that reading the novel would give my mother a sense that my life as a queer black feminist is about something more than my choice of partners. It is also about a relationship to time and people and shared space.

For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.

There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.

Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

Fiction is the history of the obscure.

A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can't escape it, it is what we are.

linear narrative was not doing a very good job representing life as I experienced it,

I had said before that all stories were magic. It had never occurred to me that all magic was stories.

Story was magic. Magic was story. Memory was also story, disparate events linked together in our mind to create a narrative.

Each story weaves together different viewpoints that-in the words of the sages-oppose one another yet are both true. These themes are the underpinnings of stories, the very motives that drive conflict, compromise, and eventual climax.

Death steals everything except our stories.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

One of the great pillars of bad journalism is the made up storyline of "Let's you and him fight" - dreaming up conflicts and story arcs where none exists. http://qr.ae/jpY6b

Arithmetic is the death of story.

Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.

what's real within the story is real within the story

Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.

E assim se passaram pelo menos seis ou seis anos e meio, direitinho deste jeito, sem tirar e nem pôr, sem mentira nenhuma, porque esta aqui é uma estória inventada, e não é um caso acontecido, não senhor.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.