Quotes About Narrative

ABS—Always Be Storytelling.

Storytelling has worked for 5000 years. It's not going to stop now just because we have blogs and tweets.

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.

Why, then, is it not possible that all things began with the black man and that he was perfect—especially since this is precisely the claim that white people have put forward for themselves all these years?

A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing—at least not deliberately—to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose.

The author must rob us of our myths, and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back or personalities.

The value of every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature in general: if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.

Why the histories of states should have so persistently insinuated themselves in the place that might have been occupied by peoples merits reflection.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.

The Bible, unfortunately, gives us only the barest outline of the flight into Egypt.

Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content. That conjunction gives it its sizzle. You carry the seed of belief within you already. You recall the time this narrative captures and sense conspiracy. I am here to tell you that it is all true and not at all what you think. You will read with some reluctance and capitulate in the end. The following pages will force you to succumb. I am going to tell you everything.

Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.

Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.

Everyone likes to learn history. They just don't like to hear it from a professor looking at notes. They like to hear it like it's from their uncle, and that's how I explain history.

As the cinema is changing, on-screen kissing, love-making scenes are becoming part of the narrative. I am not saying it is wrong, because it is the reflection of how our society has changed and become comfortable with it. But I am uncomfortable performing it on screen.

'Rapper's Delight' came from the TV entertainment show 'Good Times,' but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.

I like the way Wiseman builds a story in an unconventional way.