Quotes About Narrative

Proto-postmodernist story of a habitual gambler and his bested frog. The plot isn't much, but it's worth reading because of the fun Twain has with narrative authority. (In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.)

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.

The historian amputates reality.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead.

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats the purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.

Don't you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you'll soon find its meaning.

The story can also serve as a philosophy for getting on in society – to teach the morally superior man that each day he should investigate his own personal conduct, or that human life is suffering, or that suffering in life derives from the self. Or the story could be developed into numerous intricate and complex theories. It all depends on how the storyteller tells it.

Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.

How much does it take to have a history as opposed to anecdotes? Is there a critical mass? We

She suspected that civilization had been invented to make more stories. And

I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly.

Every dent, every scratch, every mark, tells a story. A story that ends with me, winning.

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time.

My intent, here, is to tell our story in a dramatically truthful way. While the facts may be less than accurate, please understand that the emotion is true. The intent is true. And, dramatically speaking, intention is everything.

Vedno sem neznansko užival v pripovednem zapeljevanju.Priznam, vše? mi je dramati?nost. Dobra zgodba mora vedno nastaviti pri?akovanja in jih razburljivo in presenetljivo zavla?evati.

For me, a good story is all about setting up expectations and delivering on them in an exciting and surprising way.

Thomas Hieke puts the matter: "This dramatic narrative dispels the misunderstanding that one can compel God to behave in a certain way through human—or more exactly—ritual action.

In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.

the story of Isaac and Rebekah is an account of what was, but not necessarily of what should be for all of God's people.

Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).