Quotes About Narrative

We're professional liars, aren't we? It's our job to keep the story interesting.

A little sentence can contain a big story.

I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.

Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on.

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.

Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

la confianza viene determinada por la coherencia de la mejor historia que podamos contar partiendo de la evidencia.

Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.

But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.

She has a coherent story that explains all she knows, and the coherence makes her feel good.

Uma história é sobre eventos significativos e momentos memoráveis, não sobre a passagem do tempo. A negligência com a duração é normal em uma narrativa, e o fim muitas vezes define seu caráter. [...] É assim que o eu recordativo funciona: ele compõe histórias e as retém para futura referência.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.

poor evidence can make a very good story.

flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions.