Quotes About Narrative

That idea – of one's own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.

the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.

There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work.

Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether out lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it's really all about how we choose to shape and name things.

She still held sorrows, but she was not made of them. Her life was not a tragedy. It was a history, and it was hers.

I've always been fascinated by dreams - they seem like such intriguing evidence of the brain's obsession with narrative as a form of sense-making. But because dreaming is an unconscious process, we have little control over the stories we tell, so they can be fraught with anxiety, vulnerability, and exposure.

It's much easier for me to think in terms of character movement and emotion and story rather than, 'What are some wacky hijinks we can throw together?'

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan.

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.

The narrative of 'man the hunter' presupposes that men provided the nutrition, invented the tools, and established social organization and communication through the hunt, and that women were just sitting by the fire waiting for evolution to drag them out by the hair in the 1960s in order to participate.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like 'Man of Tai Chi' just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I'm looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

Asians narratively in shows are insignificant. They're the cop or the waitress or whatever it is. You see them in the background.

A big producer offered me the part of the pretty girl that waits at home for the guy, and I couldn't do it. That's not a story I ever want to tell.

If I wake up during a dream I can usually go back to sleep and finish the story.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

When you sing on stage, the songs are part of the narrative, but in 'Unconditional Love,' it was just singing for singing's sake. It was playing at being pop star. As a young boy growing up in North Wales, that was my fantasy.

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story.

You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.

The ending is really the most important part of the movie. If the first hour and 20 minutes is terrific and the last ten minutes stinks, everybody walks out of the theatre and says: 'That was a lousy movie!'