Quotes About Narrative

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.

But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unraveling back and back and back—right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough.

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

When they – I cannot bring myself to use the first-person plural in this instance.

Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy--but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass--the edge of the left cheek, say.

The trouble with history, it seems to me, is that there are too many people involved.

On the whole, though, the guests at the party preferred the narrative about lies, fear, stupidity and racism. They had lost an argument, and they never lost arguments. They were confused and angry.

we are what's happened to us.

It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story. Of course. Isn't that how it works for everybody?

Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all, story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*. --Nicola Griffith, www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...

But we didn't invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.

We cannot leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people

In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.

it's white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that's the master narrative speaking. "This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you're not it.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

La realtà è diversa, ma sgradita, e dunque poco raccontata.

Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative." From

Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly "I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.

She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale.