Quotes About Narrative

History is subjective. History is alterable. History is, finally, little more than modeling clay in a very warm room.

To the modernist, "myth," like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

Everyone has a story, it is what defines us. Our story continues to alter as we evolve in-and-out of our own skin, changing in manipulating the world around us.

Every man is a hero of his own story.

All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

One can believe in a story without believing it happened.

When you read a book, it's like you're becoming an actor, taking on the roles of a dozen different people, coming to know and love them like you know yourself. It's one of the best ways to experience another life, to become something that you are not.

El propósito del cuentacuentos no es decirte cómo pensar, sino plantearte dudas que te hagan reflexionar. Demasiado a menudo, lo olvidamos. -Hoid-

Summarizing is when you take a story that is complicated and interesting, then stick it in a microwave until it shrivels up into a tiny piece of black crunchy tarlike stuff. A wise man once said, "Any story, no matter how good, will sound really, really dumb when you shorten it to a few sentences.

Wit smiled. "All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

The only point in creating something is to watch it die. Like a story that must come to a climax, what I have done will not be fulfilled until the end has arrived.

What is fact? What records did the church, in its misguided attempt to cleanse the past of perceived contradictions, rewrite to suit its preferred narrative?

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind.

A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.

People in a group each pretend to be someone different, and tell a story together.

you don't understand a man until you understand what makes him do what he does. Every man is a hero in his own story, Princess.

This is my story. Or, well, part four of it. Otherwise known as "The part where everything goes wrong, and then Alcatraz has a cheese sandwich.

Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain.

This is one reason we need to dispel the myth that empathy is "walking in someone else's shoes." Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it's like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn't match my experiences.

When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

When we reject the truth of someone's story—the ultimate failure of story stewardship—it's often because we've stealthily centered ourselves in their story, and the narrative takeover is about protecting our ego, behavior, or privilege. The less diverse our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find ourselves struggling with narrative takeover or narrative tap-out.

The power of owning our stories, even the difficult ones, is that we get to write the ending.

You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.