Quotes About Narrative

There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.

Funny how a beautiful song could tell such an ugly story.

But those words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too.

All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this.

There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I'd kept it all this time. No matter what else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, because with this telling, he'd become part of that story, of my story, too.

It was strange, telling the story from the beginning instead of catching someone up on only the latest awful chapter.

We had just heard that story recounted so many times over the years that it was easy to take the details and fold them into our own sparse memories.

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

I think we — well, I — messed up the story.

To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.

There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life. As

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.

Not all events are stories.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.

All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.

I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as "historical factorials." Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences.

Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.