Quotes About Narrative

Define history. Was it the sequence of factual past events, the stories about the factual sequence of past events, or the interpretation of the stories about past events?

No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

I'd grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth. She could shade a story I'd heard a thousand times until all at once the meaning inverted and it became its own opposite. I was her kid. I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody's business.

the generations broken, the family broken, to be repaired like a dropped pot or snarled ark of reeds, that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot, in plopping myself in creaky unreclinable chairs around tables of prickly leaves to commiserate through recitation: flight into Egypt, plagues, flight out of Egypt, desert and plagues—a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own travail, and so the tradition is earned.

a kaleidoscope of narrative more than any coherent story.

history is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

This is a work of history in fictional form—that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists.

No mentiría; pero la mejor verdad está en lo que cuento...

Le seguí la corriente, claro, como se les sigue la corriente a todos los borrachos del mundo cuando empiezan a contar sus historias de borrachos.

Palabras más, palabras menos, lo que Barral viene a dar como razón o justificación de la preeminencia de la novela latinoamericana es el cruce casual y afortunado de dos elementos: un mundo que narrar y una lengua con que narrarlo.

What you call history is no more than the winning story, Vásquez. Someone made that story win, and not any of the others, and that's why we believe it today. Or rather: we believe it because it got written down, because it wasn't lost in the endless hole of words that only get said, or even worse, that aren't even spoken, but are only though. (p.450-451)

La historia es, por definición, estupefaciente.

There are no new stories. It all depends on how you handle them. In romances the characters are going to fall in love with each other; you know that when you see the syrupy cover. It's how get there that's the fun.

And every feeling was the heart of a story. And we all had a story.

For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity. There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories have blurred together. Usually, however, a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out. Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.

Amy Tan said, "In the telling of stories something happens, your whole perception and memory of things begins to change and you can let go of what you have just told—you give it away." In letting go, we heal.

A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.

The silences of history must be made to speak [Il faut faire parler les silences de l'histoire].

Não se pode alterar a história, a história foi o que foi.

When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.

except that Sir Lionel tended to forget the middle bits of the stories, and his "mots" weren't terribly "bon.

Shall you tell him or shall I?" Billie said. George took a breath. "Well, now that is quite a story . . .

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves, how they want them told, they are going to have to make them, they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it, Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.