Quotes About Narrative

The tale is, in large part, our capital. I was nourished on tales...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Es imposible adivinar el final de una historia mientras la estás viviendo; carece de contornos y se constituye como una serie de palabras y datos incipientes y, para ser sinceros, nunca recuperamos toda la información de aquello que fue.

I mean that you've invented the story yourself. It belong to you, not me. You've already chosen an ending, a way out. I suppose it's inevitable that you want satisfaction.

En mayor o menor medida, todos inventamos nuestro pasado.

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty might lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Memories that have never been told aren't yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon's monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the "I" addressing a "you," because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener.

Augustine's insight that emotion dims in memory, however, is overwhelmingly true of our episodic memories. The cooling of the emotions that belong to such recollections is built into the nature of this kind of memory, because it is quickly turned into narrative.

Augustine's insight that emotion dims in memory, however, is overwhelmingly true of our episodic memories. The cooling of the emotions that belong to such recollections is built into the nature of this kind of memory, because it is quickly turned into narrative. The raw affective material of memories is restructured and then told as stories from a remove.

We are all, to one degree or another, made of what we call "memory", not only the bits and pieces of time visible to us in pictures that have hardened with our repeated stories, but also the memories we embody and don't understand.

A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

She talked as if she were observing her own sentences...

all of us need a story outside ourselves, a form through which we imagine ourselves as players in the game.

Legends can live and breathe only on verbal terrain

You have to be in love with your story ... It's the love of the light; the time of day; of watching the moment unravel.

So like what I want to do is connect all of my albums and make it tell a bigger kind of story. So the first album is very focused on her family life and her love life.

I love being a part of storytelling, so whether I'm getting to do that on Survivor, or do it through kids' adventure books, or directing a movie, it's all sort of the same: Once Upon a Time...

I've been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

We, in America, love a story - we need a story to get involved in. But then everything becomes more about how the story protects a certain perception as we pick sides.

God made (human beings) because he loves stories.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.