Quotes About Narrative

And so the first part of my tale is told, and with it a candle goes out.

Whether you're an old or new brand, you can draw on mythology, as long as you present it in a new way.

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own.

Liberated from Saturn, from the order that for years had kept us in line, our narrative organized and mindful of the conventions of story. Now the order had been upset, lost in a melee of voices that for years wanted their freedom.

Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.

I'm the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day.

I respect your intelligence too much to construct a narrative that might convince you of a reality far from the truth." Mr.

Here's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Let others sing of knights and paladinsIn aged accents and untimely words.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

He left the name at which the world grew pale,To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.

I'd managed to type more than two hundred consecutive pages about more or less the same characters who stayed more or less in the same place and more or less took part in the same story.

I think in general, romantic comedies tend to take one person's point of view, but every once in a while you get something that is balanced for two people.

All of these show us the web of relationships that narrative forms, a web that supports and sustains us.

It was a love story, of course, which held the women in thrall, even though most of them had heard it many times before, but it was also a poignant story of the love two brothers had for each other.