Quotes About Narrative

17There are two sides to every story. The first one to speak sounds true until you hear the other side and they set the record straight.i

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.

Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Can a story actually do anything at all?

In truth I was very pleased with myself and with my story and all that had happened in it. Because you can't help being impressed with your own story. Because if you're not impressed with your own story, then who will be?

If a book is made up of things that are hard to believe, then we were like something out of a book.

People who play the victim role in their lives love to feel self-pity. They want you to think that what "happened" to them is who they are.

An autobiographical occasion is any moment when we are encouraged or obliged to reimagine who we are. It's a narrative event, when our existing life story is altered or redirected in some way, forcing us to revisit our preexisting identity and modify it for our life going forward. And nearly everyone goes through such moments.

The most healthful narrative," he continued, "is the third one." It's called the oscillating family narrative. We've had ups and downs in our family. Your grandfather was vice president of the bank, but his house burned down. Your aunt was the first girl to go to college, but she got breast cancer. Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life's inevitable disruptions.

If this is a straightforward historical account, God created evening, morning, and days without luminaries and then created luminaries in order to effect them.83 Are we really to conclude that the division occurs without the dividers? It seems reasonable to assume that the narrator has offered a dischronologized presentation of the events in order to emphasize a theological point. God is not dependent on the luminaries.

Writing about yourself is a funny business. At the end of the day it's just another story, the story you've chosen from the events of your life. I haven't told you "all" about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don't allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I've tried to do that.

History is not the glory of the winners, it is the weapon of the losers

We stand on the shoulders of revisionist authors such as Andrew Torget, Andrés Tijerina, Jesús F. de la Teja, Jeff Long, and Paul D. Lack, whose work is an antidote to the "Heroic Anglo Narrative" that's held sway in Texas for going on two hundred years.

The Alamo, long used in a myth that demonized and gaslit Mexican-Americans and Indigenous people, might as well be a Confederate monument in the minds of conservative adherents to the Heroic Anglo Narrative.

Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently," says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. "Davy Crockett's [death], it's sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you're looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.

In your head, you're the star of an epic movie based on your amazing fucking life. 

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.

s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.

One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on the story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity.

THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Why cover the same ground again? ... It goes against my grain to repeat a tale told once, and told so clearly.

Tell me, O muse, of travellers far and wide

It is hateful to me to tell a story over again, when it has been well told.

To form correct views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great whole — we must measure them by their relation to the mass of beings by whom they are surrounded, and, in contemplating the incidents in their lives or condition which tradition has handed down to us, we must rather consider the general bearing of the whole narrative, than the respective probability of its details.