Quotes About Narrative

And if we also ask, 'And how exactly did that happen?' we will be asking about history. Not just a story, but our story, the story that we call the history of the world. Shall we begin?

E]very community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier calls "the Story that must be told" about its own past, and where scholarship decays, myth will crowd in.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise.

Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.

If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.

Ah! Tanr?lar, kendi hikayesini yazabilen ölümlüleri e?itleri gibi severler.

Everything you know is a story. That's how human consciousness works.

You know, you asked me about our lives during the "Great Depression." None of us called it that then. It was just hard times.

if you can control the stories a culture tells about itself, you can control who they are.

What we put in and leave out of our stories tells us something about who we are.

If what I have called the "value gap" is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.

We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as "lies agreed upon.

In the effort to deny from whence we came," Baldwin declared, "we've had to make up a series of myths about it.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Me molesta cuando las historias se resuelven como un truco de magia

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.