Quotes About Narrative

History in live performance.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature.

NOTHING I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

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

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain

How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature. Q1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

Once you own history, it begins to own you.

My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments — which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story.

For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments--which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For hum beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.

Their story drew a heated response.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.

In my journals I have a lot of conversations that I'm having with you in my head. I'll be having a conversation with you and I'll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of Black woman/white woman where it's beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we're two voices.

He neither acquits nor condemns, but merely relates, and, just as a dream is more often painful than happy, so a tone of melancholy and pity for all mortal beings runs through this uncertain tale.

Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.

Well, well, sooner or later we shall come to that landmark in almost every Adventure, Pliny the Elder; and so here he is again, bitching as usual; but, as usual, telling us things of great interest.

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

Everyone has a captivity narrative; today we call it memoir.

There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a "system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.

her history written by her enemies