Quotes About Narrative

Sullen Telemachus said, "Mother, no, you must not criticize the loyal bard for singing as it pleases him to sing. Poets are not to blame for how things are; Zeus is;

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

To form correct views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great whole-we must measure them by their relation tot 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.

My story—the whole truth—I'm glad to tell it all. If only the two of us had food and mellow wine to last us long, here in your shelter now, for us to sup on, undisturbed, while others take the work of the world in hand, I could easily spend all year and never reach the end of my endless story, all the heartbreaking trials I struggled through.

Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged".

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.

Everything in history, once it has happened, looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can't imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)—the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress—is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.

That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States.

The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

No, we are getting ahead of our story, and only an jackass would do that

Each man's memory is his own private literature

Besides, it was all very well to criticise the works of others, but in fact it was quite hard, he discovered, to tell a story.

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.

Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information.

One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.

We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you — and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

One could go on, but with diminishing returns. MacArthur was a serial confabulator