Quotes About Narrative

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today

Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live today, is the essence of narrative journalism.

It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.

I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.

There is no fiction. There's only truth disguised as fiction

The key elements of storytelling are love, mystery & conflict.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

The physicality of storytelling must remain strong.

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable." ? Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way.

The great metanarrative of progress and conquest has run aground on the shoals of environmental concern and a loss of confidence in science and technology as reliable sources of our salvation. Instead of a single unifying story or grand narrative, postmodernity sees a world of many stories.

history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.

One's first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

The exaggerated dramatic force employed by Umfraville in presenting his narrative made it hard to know what demeanour best to adopt in listening to the story. Tragedy might at any moment give way to farce, so that the listener had always to keep his wits about him.

None of this seemed to be getting us much further so far as Widmerpool was concerned. I waited for development. General Conyers did not intend to be hurried. I suspected that he might regard this narrative he was unfolding in so leisurely a manner as the last good story of his life; one that he did not propose to squander in the telling. That was reasonable enough.

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity.

For my own part, I always enjoy hearing the details of other people's lives, whether imaginary or not, so that I found this side of Lovell agreeable.

An important aspect of writing unmentioned by Burton was 'priority'; what to tell first. That always seemed one of the basic problems.

Mrs. Dadds, who was telling a story about her chilblains, brought her narrative to a more or less satisfactory conclusion and paused to regain her breath.

You can use your story, or your story can use you.

Las palabras forman el hilo con el que tejemos nuestras experiencias. ALDOUS HUXLEY