Quotes About Narrative

He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.

Incident piled on incident no more makes life than brick piled on brick makes a house.

We spend our years as a tale that is told.

Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

Your home should tell the story of who you are, and be a collection of what you love brought together under one roof.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

Being able to tell one from start to finish, and making that puzzle come together at the end. That's the art for me.

When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.

Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?

I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.

The male is always the pawn in a romantic comedy. Come together, break up, go chase her, get her, roll credits. That's what happens in all of them.

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

IF YOU WANT A STORYBOOK ENDING, stop—now—and remember them in that tender moment. Be content to know that they embarked on a series of adventures throughout the West and that they stayed together through thick and thin for forty-five years. But know this as well: If their story ended here, no one would remember them at all. Where a tale begins and where it ends matters. Who tells the story, and why . . . That makes all the difference.

A tale begins and where it ends, matters. Who tells the story and why, that makes all the difference.

If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.

Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.