Quotes About Narrative

Scars are stories, history written on the body

As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren't in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.

We're held hostage by the stories that other people write for us and about us. We don't stop long enough to question why the story was written and whose purpose it serves.

You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened

What you see shapes how you change ... We tell ourselves a story of what our job is, what our company does, who the people we work with are - and that story becomes our reality. ... What you see shapes how you change

An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors.

Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

Real life is never so neat as the stories we choose to tell about it

Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.

Every day we forget stories. I saw a funny video about a cat on the Internet this morning, but when I tried to tell a friend about it, I suddenly had no idea how it ended.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society's weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.

o fato de um relato parecer ser "exato" ou não é algo que irá depender de uma tradição da comunidade (...) "falar a verdade" é falar de uma forma que confirme a tradição de uma determinada comunidade.

Rodney wasn't what you'd call eloquent, but he had a couple guys he used to drink with, so we got these bits of quadruple-drunk story: Rodney drunk when he told it, his friends drunk when they heard, then drunk again when they retold it to a bunch of drunks.

History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.

And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.

At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.

Una gran exclamación recorrió a la multitud, la exclamación se transformó en risas, en aplausos, y fue la verosimilización definitiva de la aventura. El fútbol era la realidad infinita que los abarcaba a todos, el Gran Sueño que daba continuidad a sus días y densidad narrativa a sus vidas.

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.

I guess no one's the monster in their own story. Monsters are just a matter of perspective.

Never trust someone who tells good stories, not until you know why they're doing it.

Never trust someone who tells good stories, not until you know why they're doing it.