Quotes About Narrative

Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way—and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed

But in this era of concentrated wealth, severe inequality, and rigged rules we have a master narrative that power is inherently evil. That's why the civic myths of this age are dark political melodramas like House of Cards and grim fantasies like Game of Thrones in which nice guys finish headless and the only winners are those who lie, cheat, and kill. We're not in The West Wing anymore, folks. Mr. Smith died in Washington.

the burning desire to tell the story of my dream was such that an hour seemed like an eternity.

when Melanchthon recalled it, although, as we have said, he was not yet in Wittenberg when it happened, and was really only recounting the recollections of others who had been there. So when he did, he was speaking in the way so many of us do when remembering things: we aren't telling an untruth but conflating things in a way that is not perfectly and literally accurate, specifically to make a larger point, and, as good fiction does, to tell a greater truth.

Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost it.

A book is a story for the mind. A song is a story for the soul.

There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization.

If one person believes a story, it becomes a truth—for him. That's why history is such a mare's nest: it's difficult to determine what happened as opposed to what people thought happened, wanted to happen, felt should have happened. The slant is everything

Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.

Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

had set out to tell you exactly what happened. But since I am the one writing this, how do I know what in my telling I am selecting, omitting, emphasizing; what unconscious editing I am doing?

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.

the bleakness of life takes many forms, and that none of those forms should be permitted to obscure the central mission, which is to record it honestly, powerfully, and continuously.

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos.

I believe that story changes reality.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

I am glad that we reached out, and not only to explain the Fed's side of the story amid the barrage of negative coverage.