Quotes About Narrative

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know.

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

Deux ou trois choses dont je suis sûre, et l'une d'entre elles est que raconter l'histoire jusqu'au bout est un acte d'amour

I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don't know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.

We?' said Chancellor. 'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.

There was once a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

Glapitonner: profondément ému par le récit d'une tragédie personnelle.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They're an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: It makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse.

But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.

It is all about how human beings construct a narrative out of random events, baseless assumptions, and simple-minded prejudices.

At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin. The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical drama with the physician as its hero.

Again, the only way to know that we've seen into the true nature of something is that the story we're telling ourselves releases.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.