Quotes About Narrative

There are times when we've had to decide to change or remain the same. Will we be slaves to safe, mundane routines or break out and remake our lives the way we imagine them to be? Real change may entail risk, pain, probably anxiety, and hard work, but it's a way "to be" versus not being. We've all been heroes or cowards in our own narratives, depending on the occasion and the choices we've made.

Legends, then, are seldom formed out of thin air. They grow out of something real. That original something may be extremely different from the final legend, but the kernel of truth is there nevertheless.

OK. So your story sadder'n mine. OK. But my story still my story. I mean…even if somebody else got it worse. What I got was bad enough. You know?

School-age children become storytellers. Not only do they enjoy hearing stories, they can look back over the events of their lives and weave those events together into a story or narrative and, in the process, discover meaning in those concrete experiences.

Telling or reading Bible stories to children is still one of the best ways for adults to learn the stories for themselves.

Faith includes not only a center of value and an image of power but, thirdly, trust in and loyalty to a story that helps us make sense out of our world and experiences. This is what Fowler calls the shared master story.

Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

everything has a narrative, really, and if you can't understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you're not really alive at all.

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever.

Don't you ever feel like you're just a story someone is telling about someone like you?

Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can't. You're in a story and the body writing it is an asshole.

It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea. It's all down to girls, one way or another.

I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.

In Russian fairy tales, the narrative flows a little differently. In those stories, you won't find a tale for Cinderella, one for Snow White, one for Rapunzel. Instead, a peculiar cast of characters recurs over and over, in nearly every story, performing different acts and suffering different sorrows, but remaining the same. Ivan the Fool. Yelena the Bright. Baba Yaga. Vasilisa the Brave. Koschei the Deathless.

When you don't need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That's the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.

You couldn't ever really fix a sad story. You could only make another. And another. And another, until you found the right one at last, the one that ends in joy.

All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.

Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.

It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just backstory.

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it." A