Quotes About Narrative

Una storia è come la vita senza le parti noiose.

That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.

They weren't true stories; they were better than that.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged.

Listen, and you'll hear a story being told, one you may need to know.

Words were everything, stories were more powerful than any weapon, books changed lives.

I knew that men told you the truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn't bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn't be lost.

There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened.

Is there more to the story?" Vincent asked. "There's more to every story," his aunt told him.

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

I think of life as a book of stories, he goes on. You move through the stories and the characters change.

I let the story out slowly; I knew from all the reading I'd done that was the best way to tell a tale, start far away from the center, but know where that center is at all times.

And yet, how much damage could one small book do? How powerful could it be? That was when Sally began to run, because she knew the answer. Words were everything, stories were more powerful than any weapon, books changed lives.

History is personal

If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few who will.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together.

WHEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said "during the war," their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. [ A Conversation with Alice Munro , BookBrowse, 1998]

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house. Alice Munro on reading.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house.