Quotes About Narrative

She seemed to collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table.

How could she ever know that someone would pick her story up and carry it with him everywhere?

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It's not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence

There are those who write history. There are those who make history. There are those who experience history.

Right at this moment, I don't care if they kill me. I don't care. But they're not going to kill my stories. They're not going to kill my stories. They're all I've got.

Ich erinnerte mich, wie der Baronet mir erzählt hatte, dass

I believe you are a man of your word, and a white man, and I'll tell you the whole story.

Very curious, and the story that hangs round it will strike you as being more curious still. These relics have a history then? So much so that they are history.

Esta vez, Watson, califíqueme en su relato como de burro completo.

The first object of a novelist, is to tell a tale. If he has no story to tell, what is he there for? Possibly he has something to say which is worth saying, but he should say it in another form.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us—so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

Denn indem ich Ihnen all dies erzaehlte, habe ich mein Leben noch einmal gelebt.

Awareness is the first step in rewriting old stories.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person's sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Dear Doctor, If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.

The story flared, then faded.

He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about.