Quotes About Narrative

Salman Rushdie said it well:  "Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God's kingdom advances by stories, fictions, tales that are easily ignored and easily misunderstood. Perhaps that's the only way it can be.1

Most histories are written by the winners of conflicts, but those written by the losers—if they survive—are often more interesting.

Talk is based on the assumption that you can get somewhere if you keep putting one word after another. —IBLIS GINJO, notes in the margin of a stolen notebook

Scoffin' a load of our grub an' not tellin' a story? I say, what a bally swizz!

In the Open Circuit, characters are supposed to have 'arcs,' where they grow and evolve over the course of the story. But Mom always thought that was nonsense.

Thirty chapters of good deeds never tells you a whole man's story.

No, I realize Hektor was just another rando bit player on whatever bullshit 'hero's journey' you think you've been on. But when this is over, you'll finally realize that you're not even the star of your own story. You're a goddam black hole.

Any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.

So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.

People will pay a dollar for a program with information, but they'll pay $ 10 for a program with information plus a story.

Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.

We all need to be the hero of our own story.

Every story, the moment it's written down, will be reread," she said. "And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

Bicycling, the way I think of it, is solitary, and if it's going to stand for anything in a narrative, it might as well be the solitary experience of being alive.

Life is so simple: We walk; we sit; we lie horizontal. That's about it. Everything else is a story about what's going on while we're doing it.

Reality is always kinder than the stories we tell about it.

He is already an important part of my story.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives.

And it is always the victors who write the historical narrative.

With its clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism, poststructuralism works only on narrative—on the longer genres of story and novel. It is helpless with lyric poems, where the individual word has enormous power and mystery and where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors.