Quotes About Narrative

But you don't want a retrospective, and you really don't want a summary. You want a rich, cohesive, detailed, and real view into the person's personal life or job.

Would we find that our history books covered things a little differently than the way they actually happened?

Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America's story arc.

Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

the saddest thing about being the only one left to tell a story is everybody who cares to listen is gone.

The world we build tomorrow is born in the stories we tell our children today. Politics moves the pieces. Education changes the game.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

Without law, society becomes chaos. But without narrative, law itself loses contact with the realities of human life. It becomes impersonal and at times inhuman.

In the end, it's not the stories we tell that matter, but the stories we live.

Faith he must make his stories shorter Or change his comrades once a quarter.

There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up... Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.

Without news to feed it, the biggest story starves.

Stories are a different kind of true.

Everyone's got a different story.

This is a bad story." "Sorry. I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have told you." "No, you should," I say. "But—" "I don't want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

Die Welt ist schrecklich langweilig, oder, was dasselbe ist, was an ihr interessant sein könnte, ist es nicht, solange es nicht von einem guten Schriftsteller erzählt wird.

I remember always thinking that life itself doesn't actually exist, because if no one tells it as a story or turns it into a narrative, life is merely something that happens, nothing more. To understand life, you have to tell it, even if only to yourself. This doesn't mean that a story can make life comprehensible, because there are always gaps in any narrative, whatever sutures or remedies you might try to apply. That is why a narrative only restores life in fragmentary form.

Seis o siete escenas para cada biografía, pues la vida ?lo siento? no da para mucho más.

But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They're lying.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

I tell you here what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have lived. I choose not to be silent, and you can choose to open your ears, and eyes, or close them. Maybe this story is not for you. We can agree that we each see the world differently, and each have a contribution to the larger story, and believe we have things to learn from each other.