Quotes About Narrative

While the content of many dreams seem haphazard, others are remarkably well structured; these dreams have a remarkable resemblance to drama.

Somebody's little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.

To Chase, a quad would be just a bit of fun. While he was taking care of them, he'd be telling you a story about some real trouble.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.

Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance to the music if you want to stay ahead

Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history ... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairy tale.' Well, that's harmless, isn't it?' Yeah, but in fairy tales, when someone dies... it's just a word.

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

That's the trouble about the good guys and the bad guys! They're all guys!

Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.

As the eye of narrative drew back from the coffin on its stand, two things happened. One happened comparatively slowly, and this was Vargo's realisation that he never recalled the coffin having a pillow before. The other was Greebo deciding that he was as mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more.

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting.

And then she woke up and it was all a dream.' It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story.

History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just … well, things happening one after another.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired - but that's not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there's always something before. It's always a case of Now Read On.