Quotes About Narrative

You learn to tell stories by telling stories.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact.

Since the biblical God can truly be identified by narrative, his hypostatic being, his self-identity, is constituted in dramatic coherence. The classic definition of this sort of coherence is provided by Aristotle, who noticed that a good story is one in which events occur "unexpectedly but on account of each other" [Poetics 1452a3], so that before each decisive event we cannot predict it, but afterwards see it was just what had to happen.

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

It shouldn't surprise you, then, that notes written by internists read like novellas (ones in which we're paid by the word), while a colleague of mine jokes that a typical post-op surgical note reads something like "Feeling well and doing swell.

American psychiatry has told the public a false story over the past thirty years.

What's more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

El olvido es el hijo consentido de la historia y el alero bajo el cual palpita la convivencia.

This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it's incomplete, because stories like this don't have an ending.

A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories.

Lettore, io ti voglio raccontare, nero su bianco, una nuova storia. Su bianco e nero, oltre a ragionare, è bene che ci sia buona memoria, perché chi vive senza ricordare, vive una vita cieca e senza gloria.

The type tells you what purpose the beat performs in the narrative. Beats may perform multiple functions, particularly during key moments. The resolution marks the emotional state engendered in the audience by the beat as it closes. It

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?

Ever notice folks can justify damned near anything, 'cause they're always the heroes n their own stories?

I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster. But I didn't want to think about that. I didn't want to wonder what would happen next.

It seems a fine tale, to hear you tell it that way, with none of the dirt and pain and misfortune." "It is a fine tale, even with the dirt and pain and misfortune.

History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.

They had to grow and change. He told me that if the happy ending of the tale was just a return to how things had been at the beginning, well, what was the point of writing that story at all?

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

As Gary Nabhan has written, we can't meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without "re-story-ation.

Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.