Quotes About Narrative

OF course they did,' she snapped back. 'According to them, you single-handedly won a dozen battles, restored the Spanish throne, and infiltrated Napoleon's inner circle, after which you rode an elephant, wrestled a crocodile, and swam the Straits of Gibraltar.

One doesn't just chuck away the story of one's life, however much one wishes it had read differently.

Eu, que mato mesmo quando descrevo a morte como natural, acidental. E mato porque quem conta sempre mata aquilo que originou o conto.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

If somebody has a chance to put my food in their mouth, that tells the story.

Istoria este o explica?ie, dar nu o scuz?.

in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself.

perpetuating the pain of the past. Is the telling the salve or the wound?

I am black - and I am brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.

The free discussion of daily matters, the delicate delineation of domestic detail, the passing narrative of fugitive occurrences, would seem light and transitory, if it were not broken by the interruption of a terrible earnestness, and relieved by the dark background of a deep and foreboding sadness.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell.... we can't dance synonyms.

Fictitious narrative, whether realistic or romantic, may suggest deeper truths, may tell us more about the heart of man, than all the histories that ever were written; and may tell it more agreeably. But fact has an interest, because it is fact; because it actually happened.

In the first place, history is not concerned to express beauty. I do not deny that a great historian, in narrating some heroic incident, may rival the epic and the saga. He may tell a tale which would be fascinating even if it were false. But such cases are exceptional, and ought to be exceptional. Directly it appears that the governing preoccupation of an historian is to be picturesque, his narrative becomes intolerable.

I can't imagine a life without a story.

Accept what you can't change by changing what you can't accept. My father may have died nearly in front of my daughter's nose, but I won't have her thinking the timing was all bad. I can change the narrative. Can't I?

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

Women," she said, "need to tell stories about what happens to them. That's how we get it to make sense.

They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

slaughter. And yet, so great is Mrs. Tuchman's skill that the reader forgets what he knows. Surrounded by the thunder of guns, the thrust and parry of bayonet and saber, he becomes almost a participant. Will the exhausted Germans keep coming? Can the desperate French and British hold? Will Paris fall? Mrs. Tuchman's

The more history approaches to biography the more interest it excites.

I think it's easy to see with the existence of these forms, the intermixing of prose and poetry, that they are really two sides of the same coin and that one doesn't do well without something of the other. Prose falls flat on its face without incorporating the dance of poetry and poetry has no voice without the narrative touch of prose.