Quotes About Narrative

Augustine, the most famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not astounded that there are so many different truths. His conversion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one explanation to another. When he crossed the line from paganism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond further challenge.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

people like stories because they are good, not because they are true.

All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.

I am a collector of bread crumbs, all those bits of science and history that I mash and knead together to build my stories. And now that the bread is baked and served, my goal here is to try to separate those slices of the story that are based on substantial fact from those that are pure fabrication.

Cultural Marxism, now called Political Correctness is a loaded gun that one puts to their own head. The narrative illusion normalizes the abnormal and is an elitist weapon over minions for citizen vs. citizen policing for establishment control.

First and foremost, the most profound weapon a nation or special interest can possess is "control" over information. This contributes to control over the narrative and the meme is the embryo of the narrative.

Nietzsche said that All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity. Right now there is a renaissance, an awakening, we are breaking the narrative illusion, the mask, that eats away at the face.

The narrative illusion introduces a "mind virus", which is a syntactical contagion that spreads through communicative vectors and colonizes the cognitive biases of the targeted individual's psychology, thus transforming the mental processes of that target.

Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy.

It always matters who the storyteller is. It's a lens.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. —PLATO, Republic, BOOK II

Dear me, you are being truthful today," he said, with remarkable perspicuity. "Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction.…

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

He then took his listeners back to their common beginnings, to the founding of the nation, unraveling a narrative to demonstrate that when the Constitution was adopted, "the plain, unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity

The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.