Quotes About Narrative

When forced to pick between truth and legend, print the legend.

Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present.

The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.

And remember, it's always her fault. That's your story and you're sticking to it.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.

When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

Accountability can mean letting people tell their account, their story.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

Every story I write starts with a dilemma or a theme. Once I am convinced that this is the issue that is perturbing my thoughts, I start to look for characters capable of representing it.

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

There's a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?

In a way, like Scheherazade to King Shahryar, I told stories to death so that it would spare my life and my images, stories that seemed to never end.

Our lives, and sometimes deaths, are stories written in bone.

Consciousness is a story that we tell ourselves. But what if that story is a lie?

I like stories very much," the priest said. "They help me understand myself better.

history has been recorded by the victors, not the defeated or disenfranchised.

Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book.