Quotes About Narrative

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

I'm always curious what the world is trying to tell story wise.

Stories have always been incredibly comforting and can help illuminate things that are hard to understand other wise.

You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.

There are always things you wish you could've done better, and there are always things that you wish would've turned out a different way in terms of storyline, which you're not in charge of.

What we want to tell, we wish our friend to have curiosity to hear.

I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative - the story of mankind, not just of man.

I always found the witches and wicked stepmothers far more interesting than the 'heroines' - at least they actually did something.

Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don't want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.

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.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

I don't concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn't a single marriage that couldn't provide enough narrative arc for a novel.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark's gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all.

While the story about the hunt for bin Laden has been exhaustively reported and the key sources and witnesses are in agreement about the main points of the narrative, of course, it's still possible that we could learn new details about the story that would add to the narrative.

That's always been the driving force on the show, we're the ones who should be getting put in bad situations not the other people, they're more like witnesses. That's really like the big spin that we thought was good.

It has been very rare to see a black woman as a protagonist. And also as three-dimensional people - mathematicians, mothers, wives, complicated people, not perfect.