Quotes About Narrative

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the feeling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

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.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Like most adventures, it was best experienced in the telling, rather than the execution.

The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us.

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]

For as 'Wright's Ninth Rule of Writing' states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not.

simply telling the truth wasn't half enough. It still has to be brought to fictional life.

Behind every statistic there is an individual, there is a story.

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.

Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of. Funny

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

When you return home, you'll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you're dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you'll speak and act and be alive again.

Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.

He had thought the story was *theirs*, People's, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn't be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who'd been in it, not People, however much they wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was through.

How long is the Tale? she had asked, and Mrs. Underhill had said: you and your children and your children's children will all be buried before that Tale's all told.

We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.

We're made of stories now brother. Its why we don't die even when we do.