Quotes About Narrative

It's not meant to be a factual story, but it's still true.

By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.

What really pissed me off about what you wrote, Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you're protecting?

You never know how a story ends until you read the last page

They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.

When you tell a story, you shape the truth.

Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show "still." You can just show him being alive.

her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children's story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built....

This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children's story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built....

There was no point in questioning her version of the story.

the trouble with my life was that it had no strong central storyline—at least, certainly not a conventional one, with love and marriage as its main theme. Just when I thought I'd found something to hold on to, the plot was altered by events I couldn't control.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

the perpetual disruptive nature of youth generally. "Desolation," yes, but also a child's sense of immediacy, the capacity to enter into the moment-by-moment flow of life as it unfolds, not trying to make narrative sense of one's situation, and not caring overmuch if the whole setup comes crashing down.

The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books.

achievements, and epic failures were all amazing stories that Orson told masterfully.

I know you've all heard the advice, "Show, don't tell." The best writers don't tell you, and quite frankly they don't just show you -- they make you feel it, live it, taste it, touch it. Storytelling is about being in the moment with the characters.