Quotes About Narrative

Stevie, how many stories - It's all one story, Stevie said, and the confidence in her voice surprised her. It was about money then, and it's about money now.

The bones were on the table, naked and chalky. The eye sockets hollow, the mouth in a loose grimace, as if to say. Yep, it's me. Bet you're wondering how I ended up here. It's a funny story actually....

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two modest and seemingly obedient daughters—refused to marry men they did not love, they changed the course of narrative and laid open to question the most basic institutions of their times, beginning with marriage.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story Ã¢â'¬Â¦.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life

We've got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.

I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story

He wrote as if he'd been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life's events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them. It gets to be

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's

History is not good news or bad news, it's just one big story unreeling. There are no small parts, only small actors.

Watch your thoughts-listen to them because they shape your life and evolve into words. They tell a story about you and how you perceive your life.