Quotes About Narrative

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

The dead are silenced and the living are speechless.Who's going to tell their stories if I don't?

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

Sharing our story is one way we create intimacy. And like a good novel, it's more engaging – and lasting – when we allow it to gradually unfold.

Then the influenza epidemic arrived. Unlike the plague of Athens, unlike the Black Death, unlike even the cholera epidemic that felled William Sproat and the other cholera epidemics to come in that century, the flu epidemic had no chronicler.

I tell it to you now to remind you the reason for stories in the first place. It is a way to pluck the loose stitching of a garment so capacious one cannot tell where the top is, where the bottom is. In this way our words take full sail and lift us to another time and place.

It's a ridiculous story, of course, but history's full of ridiculous stories. 'You can't make this shit up,' one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don't ask me. I just work here.

Simultaneously (in the inner voice of a female American cultural studies professor): Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

STORY" is more than half of the word "HISTORY". And that's no accident.

The rest, but a small part, is fiction, part of the mosaic of storytelling that a writer must employ to bring life to his tale. But as to which part is truth and which small part is fiction, I will leave that for you to decide.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.

There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.

If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel

People before paper; stories before statistics.

I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson's four steps for creating change, in the secret world of prisons or otherwise: There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things. Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.

Our brains are organized by narrative and image. After

Suddenly I guess why he's so angry. All those shows tell the stories of passengers, not drivers. When I ask him, he says, "Exactly! This country thinks people with money are interesting, not people who need money like me.

There was no such thing as Palestinians…. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people… and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Come to think of it, I am more than a little tired of hearing about how the Jews 'stole' land from Arabs in Palestine. The facts are quite different. A lot of good money changed hands, and a lot of Arabs became very rich indeed.

Every one of us is a story in progress.

One crucial thing to keep in mind as you read any Hebrew narrative is the presence of God in the narrative. In any biblical narrative, God is the ultimate character, the supreme hero of the story.

I'll tell you, but it's a whole book.