Quotes About Narrative

But now I'm thinking that wanting to end up with a great storyteller might have been a bad idea. Because girls who can tell great stories are also great liars.

El dolor psíquico experimentado por las poblaciones subordinadas debe ser tratado como ideología, no como un conocimiento anterior a la caída de Adán y Eva o como una teoría social comprensiva condensada... Pensar otra cosa implica afirmar que el dolor es meramente banal, una historia que ya siempre se ha contado.

instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

We are here making myths that are, at the same time, absolutely true.

The best record of what befell the explorers comes from the pen of Peter Martyr

Among those in attendance at Santa María de la Victoria that day was a Venetian scholar named Antonio Pigafetta

was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot's log, but a more personal, anecdotal

and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day;

Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians' customs.

the account was embellished with various wonders of

The magickian learns that his or her life is nothing more than a story, usually written by authority figures in his or her life. The magickian's task then becomes to take up the magickal tools of pen and paper and to take the job of 'author' away from 'authority' and to re-write his or her life.

That's another story, replied my father.

Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story...

Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story.

Who has time to make up stories when the truth is so much more interesting?

Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility.

Cinderella' from the point of view of the stepsisters. Maybe they weren't so wicked after all. Maybe she was actually a bitch to them.

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

Sergeant Jack Webster, an Oklahoman whose adventure in running across an enemy minefield in France at such a speed that the mines exploded harmlessly to his rear was a story told to every replacement upon arrival in the company.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

You can't reconstruct a story—you can't even know what the story is—if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.