Quotes About Narrative

Sometimes you might make up a story and tell it to other people

How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story .

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.

It is no more malicious, and surely no more unnatural than the act of introducing the male black widow spider to the female of the species. For, what is one doing but hasten the procedure of Nature, and thereby abridging the narrative?

It was a very American story, somehow. 'Lost.' Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative -- this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.

She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14, nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus.

It was like a storybook: her life was being written for her. She did not have to write it, only just to read it. The pages were being turned for her, too

It was as if I'd been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.

Lo importante en nuestra sociedad no es lo que pasa, sino quién cuenta lo que pasa.

The I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else's misery.

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

a story can stay buried in my memory for years and years, but the minute it surfaces into consciousness as a story idea, it is likely to get lost. If I don't grab it as it begins to form itself as a narrative, it can become permanently erased, and even if I remember the general subject matter, the voice that started narrating in my mind eludes me.

That's right! And I'm going to tell him exactly how I got these stains on my

Our lives, and even our afterlives, are made from the stories we tell each other. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Black nationalism establishes itself as counter to the narrativizing of race as class within this social order.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

The Real War Will Never Get in the Books. And so good-bye to the war.