Quotes About Narrative

She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book. It didn't.

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. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. And what if your story doesn't work? You keep changing it until you find one that does.

all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[...]

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

JUSTINE: Is the story supposed to be jumping around like that, from Mary's head, to Diana's, to Beatrice's?

MARY: Hysterical mutism is most often associated with trauma, such as an assault of some sort. I learned that in Vienna, when we were discussing symptoms of madness before Diana was— CATHERINE: Could you please not spoil the plot for our readers? You can talk about researching symptoms of madness all you want when I get to Vienna. I mean when you get to Vienna, later in the narrative.

I am a daughter of these mountains, and of the tales. Once, I wanted to be in the tales themselves. When I was young, I had my part in one—a small part, but important. When I grew older, I had my part in another kind of story. But now I want to become a teller of tales.

To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.

O Muse, tell me the story Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.

So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

I've never used the word 'I' in a piece in my 18 years in journalism.

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about race. To my mind, it was more about telling stories of people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. Invisible people.

Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.

I'm trying to grow more as a journalist and understand the story I'm photographing in order to communicate it in a better way.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.