Quotes About Narrative

Without a story there is no meaning. And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story. To understand this is to understand the true power of stories. And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling... Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

Although the past really happened—in the same way that the world is indeed out there—history is something we make.

In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, readers want to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but they want to be wrong.

If you're writing a full-length novel, you don't need to bend over backward trying to be clever in the first line or two. Readers will understand that there's a lot of story to tell, and they'll give you some space to do that. Don't rush the opening.

Readers couldn't care less how many acts are in your story. In fact, if you write it well, they probably won't even be able to keep track of them. Instead, they care about the forward momentum of the story as it escalates toward its inevitable and unexpected conclusion. Let the shape of the story determine the number of acts, not the other way around.

A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

We're all stories, in the end.

Fiction is empathy technology.

there is inevitably something of "us" in the stories we tell about the past. This is the historian's predicament, and it is foolish to think there is some method, however well intentioned, that can extricate us from this predicament. (p. 10, paperback edition)

This may become a history book, but remember, it is only my history.

History was a tapestry long in the making, and through time the threads would change.

Listen, then, for I am a soulscaper and have the gift of the story tongue.

Sometimes it felt as if he telling his own story, and he realized that mixed up with the tragedy of Khaster were images and feelings from when the Magravandians had sacked home. When he related Tayven's violation, he spoke in the first person. Yet it was so different.

I love telling stories, so I was hopelessly seduced.

You followed a story and the story was partly your own.

With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light.

great photojournalists

Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

We do not write the story of childhood with a dry-erase board, we write with a permanent Sharpie.

Do you stop reading a book because you don't want to watch the characters you like turn out to be unlikable, or the ones with which you identify denied the happy ending you believe they deserve?