Quotes About Narrative

Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal.

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

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told

He who controls the present, controls the pen that records the past and thus is the owner of the brush that paints the future.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?

Memory is not history, even though memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in constructing a historical past.

Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history.

Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.

If we want to know and reverence God truly, we will dedicate ourselves to becoming biblical theologians who understand the narrative and themes of Scripture.

8:37 Instead of narrative build-up, what if we have Icarus crawling right into the water - wings on, indifferent to flight - skipping past the story-part to lie down in the ending?

I saw a film today, oh boy, The English army had just won the war, A crowd of people turned away, But I just had to look, having read the book...

Don't be too didactic. Your writing shouldn't teach someone, your story should.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

wonderful to relate)

We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.