Quotes About Narrative

To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country's history;

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.

a true narrative like time and tide must run its course and would respect no man.

This question of a woman telling her story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but amusement to others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.

The best fiction is truer than history

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. ...You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

Verhalen horen zich in het verleden af te spelen, en hoe verder het verleden, zou men kunnen zeggen, des te beter voor ze, in hun hoedanigheid van verhalen, én voor de verteller, wiens gemurmel de onvoltooid verleden tijd bezweert.

Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative's imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches over light-years.

Wir werden sie ausführlich erzählen, genau und gründlich, – denn wann wäre je die Kurz- oder Langweiligkeit einer Geschichte abhängig gewesen von dem Raum und der Zeit, die sie in Anspruch nahm? Ohne Furcht vor dem Odium der Peinlichkeit, neigen wir vielmehr der Ansicht zu, daß nur das Gründliche wahrhaft unterhaltend sei.

We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail - for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?

C'est un fait que nous ne venons de soulever la question de savoir s'il est possible de raconter le temps, que pour avouer que c'était bien là notre dessein dans l'histoire en cours.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

No matter how the official narrative of this turns out, it seemed to Heidi, these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.

History is not woven by innocent hands.

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

Once she saw herself as the source of her disappointing love story

Much of the horror of a breakup is the insult to our expectations of how this story was supposed to unfold versus how it actually did.

History is not what happened but what is written down

History is not what happened. History is what was written down.

Perfume should tell a story – the story of who you are, who you might be, perhaps even of who you fear becoming . . .

Perfume should tell a story –

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It's not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It's what comes before history that isn't boring.