Quotes About Narrative

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

if you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think.

The Depth of your Mythology is the Extent of your Effectiveness.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

That sounds like more of your revisionist history.

Today, in our "shut up, get over it, and move on" mentality, our society misses so much, it's no wonder we are a generation that longs to tell our stories.

But that wasn't right. Her life wasn't a story, and it didn't have to end this way. She was a girl. She was real. It was true.

I will write my story for my better self.

The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning's life, from the early days in Herefordshire to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the unity of a biography.

Yes, surely that was a disruption. But it was not even remotely the whole story.

There were other, messier details in the story, but we didn't need to go into those now, and here.

All stories are true stories, or so Will tells me.

There was a girl. There's always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true.

Feeling like you're the protagonist of your own story doesn't guarantee you're going to make it to the final act of anybody else's.

If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.

If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.

But the point is that I didn't want this book to depict events with any accuracy. I am a fan of whatever you want to call this category of fiction in which authors use their real names for their character names.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

The postwar canonizing of Southern heroes, together with the cultivation of the plantation myth, which conjured an antebellum golden age, effectively destroyed the narrative of emancipation, which had been written in the blood of war

Sometimes people have a lot to lose by telling stories in certain ways, so they work very hard to hide the things that don't fit with their views of themselves,

Are you quite sure that you want to hear it?" he asked. "Sometimes, Maria, a story that one hears starts one off doing things that one would not have had to do if one had not heard it.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

The basic belief of feminism is not that women are right and men are wrong; It is merely that women are people and therefor their voices matter, their values matter and their stories matter. It's time for women to tell their versions of what it means to be fully human. It is time for men to respect those insights and it is time for all of us to integrate them into a new story of power.

My mother would hate me saying any of this. My father, too. It didn't matter how unprivate you were: If what you had to say about your life impinged on the privacy of others, then you shouldn't say it. My mother loved stories, though, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like.